FOI 84369

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 84369

I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 24^th May 2021. Please find below the response to your request:

I would like to find out the number of missing persons investigations there have been within the force in the financial years: 2017-2018; 2018-2019; 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. Please outline these in a table showing the totals separately.

In a separate table, for each financial year, could you split the figures down to missing person’s ethnicity?

Reply:-

Please see below tables

Caveat

Please be advised that the below data has been researched from the COMPACT IT system and NOT all missing person reports are recorded onto this system .This is particularly the case for short lived reports where i.e. a missing child/adult returns very quickly
within 0-4 hrs.

The true figures in relation to your questions are therefore likely to be significantly higher that the data provided below ( an estimated 10-15% higher). This situation is not unusual with many other UK Police Forces and West Mercia Police are taking steps to address this with an automatic interface from our Command and Control system to COMPACT which will ensure all missing reports are captured onto COMPACT at point of call.

Currently missing reports are having to be manually double keyed from Command and Control onto COMPACT and many missing people are found or return before this is completed.

To totally satisfy this request would require a manual trawl of each call to the Police where a person was reported missing on Command and Control and then the examination of each report to recover the data.