Police investigate nearly 60 missing people cases a day

Police Scotland said it has dealt with nearly 22,000 individual investigations into missing people over the past year.

Police Scotland has warned more needs to be done to safeguard vulnerable children and adults after newly released figures revealed it carries out nearly 60 investigations into missing people every day.

Out of nearly 22,000 cases in the last year, the force said more than half (54%) involved individuals who had gone missing multiple times, with one person the focus of more than 170 separate investigations over the 12 month period.

The force, which said the problem is “illustrative of the non-crime related demand” on its resources, stressed it alone cannot prevent people from going missing, and urged its partners and communities to help address the issue.

A leading missing person’s charity told The Scotsman that liaising with missing people after they were safely located was key to curbing the problem.

It pointed that providing return interviews for individuals, which can identify underlying issues and prevent future missing episodes, is not a statutory requirement in Scotland, unlike in England and Wales.

The stark statistics showing the scale of the police’s work were outlined this morning at the third International Conference on Missing Children and Adults, held at Abertay University in Dundee.

Speaking at the event, Assistant Chief Constable Andy Cowie revealed there had been 21,817 individual investigations in the 12 months since April 2016.

He told the conference: “People go missing for a broad range of reasons and usually voluntarily. But we also know that the majority of people who go missing are vulnerable.

“What our data tells us is that we need to do more, working with partners, to understand why people go missing, to prevent people going missing and to protect the most vulnerable people in our communities.”

The newly compiled statistics show that out of those people reported missing in the past year, 58% were male, and 53% were aged 13 to 16.

While more than three quarters (76%) of those people reported missing returned within 24 hours, one per cent have yet to be traced.

A total of 78 out of the 87 people traced deceased in 2016/17 were adult males, most of whom had not been missing before.

Only last month, the Scottish Government