POLICE should overhaul their procedures for dealing with the relatives of missing people, researchers have said.
A report by experts from Glasgow University found several instances of good practice but warned that in general there needs to be better communication between police and the families of people who have disappeared. Relatives are often left carrying out their own searches while police conduct the official hunt separately, the study found.
Dr Hester Parr, from the University of Glasgow's School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, said of communication between police and families: "The quality tended to be reliant on individual officers and their approach to family liaison. What is needed is a change to procedures that is adopted through police education and training."
Lucy Holmes, researcher manager at Missing People, said the study, based on interviews with 25 family groups, offered "important insights into the ways in which families search for missing loved ones".
A Police Scotland spokesman said: "These research findings are already being fed into police training at the Scottish Police College as well as the Police National Search Centre and reinforce our experience on the importance of good communication with the families."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article