What happens or occurs when an officer is missing on line of duty or off duty, what would be the difference in action and if there are stories if youre familiar with any
What if an Officer becomes Missing
r/AskLE
What happens or occurs when an officer is missing on line of duty or off duty, what would be the difference in action and if there are stories if youre familiar with any
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Depends on the circumstances. If an officer randomly just disappeared then I’m sure that the agency would do anything in their power to locate them.
Florida has Blue Alert
I’m a dispatcher. If an officer isn’t answering the radio or their phone then we send other officers to their last known location. If we still can’t find them, we do a radio roll call. We go down the list of all officers on duty and have them reply on the radio. The idea is we hope that the officer missing may just be not paying attention or the radio is turned down and us saying every single unit on duty will get their attention. If they still can’t be found, then we basically start a search. Start at the last known location and go from there.
Important to note that most agencies have GPS on patrol units and even fire units. So if they’re missing, at least we can find their vehicle and start there.
There wouldn’t be any other action, maybe a little sense of urgency from the beginning because they would know it’s likely an emergency. But there’d be a lot more people that the department would directly know who to contact and where. They’d know my emergency contacts, my mostly used phone number, my social medias, have a tracker in my take home car, the cars I normally drive, know where I live and who I’m close with who would know my hang out spots . If you can’t find out if I’m in danger and or if I’m really missing and you know all of that that police department is very bad at their job.
Something like this happened in a nearby jurisdiction. A deputy in a rural area pulled down a dirt road in the woods to write a report and call his wife. He got off the phone with her around midnight. He was supposed to get off at 0700 but hadn’t turned in his paperwork from the shift and didn’t call in on the radio to go out of service. They tried to call him on his cell and checked at his house and didn’t find him. They mobilized pretty much every deputy, and officers from city officers from surrounding jurisdictions, as well as DNR and Highway Patrol, and started searching everywhere for him. Unfortunately, they found him deceased. He’d been run over by his own car. They suspected that sometime after getting off the phone with his wife, he tried to put his car in gear and it wouldn’t go, so he got out of his car to see if he could see anything wrong with it, and while he was in front of it, if slipped all the way into gear and ran over him.
We go looking for him/her
Wouldn’t happen at my department. If you are on a call and dispatch hasn’t heard from you in more than 10 min they will 10-4 check you. If you don’t answer, they send everyone. If they try and dispatch you to a call and you don’t answer, they send everybody to your gps location. It really would be damn near impossible to just ‘go missing’
This happened last year to New Mexico State Trooper Justin Hare.
He stopped behind a vehicle to assist with the suspect’s flat tire. Suspect walked over to the officer’s passenger window and shot him in the head.
Got in the officer’s vehicle and drove the vehicle a few miles down (I believe it was a few miles if I recall correctly) and dumped his body on the side of the road and drove off with the police vehicle before abandoning the car.
It was only hours later into the daytime when the trooper’s body was found after a manhunt for both the suspect and officer. He was alerted missing after failing to respond to the dispatcher asking for updates on the traffic stop. Another trooper pulled up and reported the trooper’s vehicle as missing except for the suspect’s vehicle still on the side of the road.
Multiple agencies finally tracked the suspect down and after a short foot pursuit between houses and yards, he was shot and taken into custody
Had a coworker (corrections) who did show up for work. (I was an officer not supervisor at the time) supervisors and staff made multiple calls to her and emergency contacts. Did a welfare check shortly after no contact was done and unfortunately she committed suicide. Rough night for all of us
Idaho Game Warden Bill Pogue was murdered in the line of duty along with Warden Conley Elms. The murderer dumped Elms body in a river and packed Pogues body out in to the Nevada desert and hid it.
Had a girl drop her All Call GPS in a steel out house. Acted like a faraday cage at the beach parking lot. Very tense dead air till she retraced her steps. That night it became really tense and the bathroom breaks only at the fire stations. Policy went to bathroom on the hour only.
On-duty? It’s generally not going to happen, depending on the size of the agency and their policies.
Even when I was a local in rural New England and the only guy on during a shift, the regional dispatch had us verbally check-in every 30-60min, assuming they didn’t hear us over normal traffic anyways. We also have one or two other “passive” systems that can alert dispatch that there may be an issue that I’m not going to get into. I digress; Any (patrol) agency that is their guys go unheard from for over an hour, I have to question their policies and procedures on multiple levels, for multiple reasons.
Off-duty? I mean, officially, I can’t see why it would be any different than the layman going missing. Unofficially, what do you think? I’m not even that big into the “Thin Blue Line bro-culture” but I’d get out on my day off and be looking, assuming we had reasonably actionable intelligence or information that they went missing in our general area (i.e. I’m not going to start trudging through the depths of haunted old-growth New England forests because Lieutenant Lucifer went on a bender in Las Vegas while on vacation and hasn’t been heard from for 12 hours).
Only story I have is from when i worked for the same local agency I mentioned earlier. Off-duty guy from a couple towns over gets reported missing by his parents (he was young, like 22-23, still lived with them, I believe). It was winter, but he was an avid hiker. His parents advised that there was a particular trail in our town he frequented. Think his name was Brian.
We rallied at the parking lot of this location.
Apparently, there was some severe lack of communication, or a profound miscommunication or misunderstanding, and it turned out he hadn’t been “missing” for that long… he merely hadn’t picked-up his phone and he missed dinner. But, it was getting dark, it was wicked cold (it was going to be -20F that night) and he still wasn’t answering his phone, so 🤷♂️
Then we hear mother (she and the father were at the parking lot with us) shriek and say “ohhh, Brian, thank God!”
Brian was in the crowd. With us. He had been hanging-out with another cop, and — and perhaps I didn’t get the exact details but this is how I remember it — they got called-in to help. How the hell he didn’t know he was looking for himself, I’ll never know. My money has always been that his buddy he was with took the actual phone call and pulled a little prank, but if he did, he had a good poker face from what I remember.
They’ll send out a Blue Alert.
Not an officer, but work call taking/dispatch, even not calling in, is reason enough for them to send officers to your door for a welfare check. Apparently, they’ve found plenty of suicides this way or even just natural causes.
I went home for my lunch break when I was on graveyard shift in my mid 20s. One evening, I sat on the couch, but didn’t realize my volume knob on the radio turned down rubbing on the cushion. My phone was on vibrate, but not in my pocket. Next thing I knew I was waking up to the sound of my doorbell repeatedly going off and a couple of officers from my squad at the door. I had fallen asleep and wasn’t answering the radio or my phone 😬 we log where we’re taking lunch on the laptop in the car, so they knew where to find me