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If you’ve spent any amount of time online in the US true crime scene you’ve probably seen among other things the same account repeated over and over: teenage girl disappears without a trace; her concerned parents want to report her missing but local police refuses on grounds that she obviously just ran away and will probably contact them later. Potentially she’s just a junkie, a troublemaker delinquent or future prostitute; either way they think it’s not their job to search for her because reasons. They might also tell them to wait one/two/three days before filing a missing person claim because that’s the law or something. (True crime nerds will be happy to point out that no such law exists anywhere in fact.)
Later at some point someone finds her corpse or remains and it’s confirmed that she was brutally raped, tortured and slaughtered by some deranged serial killer or opportunistic toxic rapist dudebro. She is often identified only decades later thanks to DNA examination. (DNA research is a huge topic in the true crime subculture/fandom.) Said nerds, normally lipstick feminists and liberals, usually white suburban women, all agree that it’s a sad commentary on US police being lazy, misogynistic, uncaring assholes, especially in the South, of course.
Fair enough, I tell myself after hearing this; it’d be indeed difficult to show the police in a positive light in such cases. But I also notice what always goes unaddressed is the possibility that laziness and human evil alone do not fully explain the attitude of policemen. I mean – surely there were masses of teenagers who did indeed run away from home, weren’t there? And there was also a big surge in their number during the cultural and social upheaval of the ‘60s and ‘70s, right? We never hear about the great majority of them because their names never made it to true crime videos or documentaries, but the police was surely aware of them.
I once came across a description in a true crime book of social ills that led to a surge in crime in Weimar Germany. Millions of war veterans returned home, convinced that they fought for nothing and were humiliated, many of them with shattered bodies and/or shattered minds. Since these men were often violent and became alcoholics or drug addicts, if they had teenaged children, those often ran. The parallels with the US after the Vietnam War are kind of obvious, especially if we also consider the consequences of the upheavals I referred to above. In the Weimar era there were also many cases of divorced women throwing their children out to the street because daddy could no longer pay child support, and children running away from families that lost everything due to hyperinflation and later the Great Depression; many of them ended up as underaged prostitutes.)
So anyway, I find it a bit odd that the prejudices of law enforcement officers, who have to deal with the scum of society everyday, are dismissed automatically as evidently baseless. And this phenomenon does seem to be Blue Tribe coded.
Ultimately, I completely dislike any argument of "one is too many" (not that I haven't fallen into the same trap myself sometimes for things that tickle my biases). People don't know for a fact that one incident is too many because the people making those arguments don't ever stop to consider what the opportunity cost might be. Not that I actually believe that the police are actually a shining beacon of optimizing their efforts, or even actually serving the people properly, either.
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There's a saying in medicine, "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras". The idea is that medical students' imaginations get captured by rare exotic diseases, which they spuriously diagnose their patients with on the flimsiest of evidence. It's far more likely that the patient is suffering from an extremely common illness (even an unusual presentation of a common illness) than that they're suffering from a rare, exotic illness. I'm currently rewatching the medical drama House, whose working title was Chasing Zebras, the idea being that House and his team are the ones who chase down the zebras only after the less talented and specialised medics have confirmed that it isn't a horse. Almost every episode begins with House being presented with an unsolved case whose etiology he dismisses as something banal and uninteresting: it's only after the patient's symptoms worsen that he realises it really is a zebra.
The admonition to think of horses rather than zebras is not just an amusing observation about the availability heuristic, about the funny fact that we fixate on statistically rare events at the expense of common ones. Rather, it is an important lesson for doctors to internalise, not just to improve their skill as diagnosticians, but for the sake of their patients' welfare and for the efficiency of the medical system as a whole. Ordering tests for a statistically rare illness your patient almost certainly doesn't have wastes their time and unnecessarily immiserates them: rather than doing so, you should have started treatment for the common illness they probably do have. Ordering unnecessary tests is wasteful, a major contributor to Baumol's cost disease, and means that other doctors will get the results of tests they ordered much later (which in turn delays treatment for their patients). Doctors, sadly, are notoriously bad at statistics, which is a shame when statistics are such a huge part of their job.
A huge proportion of complaints about the deficiencies of a given country's medical system ultimately boil down to people failing to understand the "think horses, not zebras" insight. You'll have an obese person who'll claim that a whole series of doctors erroneously assumed their health problems were caused by their obesity and their advice boiled down to "lose weight", only to discover that they actually had a tumour. We're meant to interpret this as evidence of entrenched fatphobia among medics or whatever, but whenever I hear one of these stories, I can only think that this is the medical system working exactly as intended. When an obese person complains of health problems consistent with those caused by obesity, nine times out of ten they are caused by obesity, and would be resolved with lifestyle changes. Running a cancer test on every obese patient who complains about trouble sleeping and shortness of breath would bankrupt the health service overnight. I feel the same when photogenic young women appear on television to complain that their doctors missed the symptoms of their breast cancer and they're trying to "raise awareness" thereof. Despite what ad and awareness campaigns would have us believe, breast cancer is a disease that overwhelmingly affects older women. Preemptively screening every woman in her twenties for breast cancer is not a remotely sensible use of scarce medical resources. But everyone loves a sob story, especially when the victim is young and attractive. Older women might as well not exist for how much attention people pay to them.
Likewise here. When a teenaged girl goes missing, and the police tell the family not to worry because she's only run away from home and she'll surely show up in a day or two – well, I don't have hard stats on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were correct nine times out of ten. Having the police drop everything and initiate a full-scale manhunt every time a teenage girl yells "I never asked to be born!" at her parents is not a remotely sensible allocation of scarce police resources. (Indeed, if it became common knowledge that this is how police departments react whenever a teenage girl goes missing, it would be something that organised criminals could exploit: pay a junkie a hundred quid to report her non-existent daughter missing, then rob a bank while the police are preoccupied looking for her.)
On the margin, this approach inevitably means that doctors will occasionally miss a disease independent from an obese person's BMI, a young woman's breast cancer, or that the police will miss a teenager who actually has been abducted. This is regrettable, and yet I defy you to think of an alternative which is better on net. When you hear missing teenager, think runaway, not serial killer.
I know last month I devoted a whole post to criticising people who think the government should dictate who journalists are allowed to report on, how, and in what timeframe, pointing out the perverse incentives and side effects this would inevitably create. And yet I maintain the world would be a much better place if no one was allowed to report the news unless they could provide accurate definitions of "mean", "median" and "mode".
Your docs suck at stats link is broken.
Thanks, fixed.
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Very tangentially: I can't strongly enough recommend The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon. He was a teenager in Weimar Germany and it was an unmitigated disaster. Nearly getting murdered by communists. Thinking maybe he should join them. Then ultimately death-squadding them and denying responsibility for the killing of Rosa Luxemburg.
Back on topic, and to be very fair to the cops: They commonly see "disappeared teenagers" turn out to be kids spending a couple days with their boyfriends. Then yet another parent says their daughter disappeared. Why would they think death by torture rather than yet another kid who will be back in a few days?
I don’t disagree with your point but I suggest some minimal level of nuance should be in order. For example, I recall reading about multiple true crime cases where the disappeared girl’s purse, phone, credit card, favorite clothes etc. were all left behind at the house and yet local police was clinging to their theory for a long time that she ran away which obviously makes little sense.
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I mean it's easy enough for you to believe that the cops neglected vulnerable teenage girls when it's about grooming gangs. Maybe it was like that.
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U.S.: 2.7 million soldiers and 60,000 casualties against a country of 210 million.
German Empire: 14 million soldiers, 1.7 million dead, total population 60-65 million.
Totally different ballgame, and that’s before you compare the economic situations.
Anyway, I always got the impression that true crime’s fascination with
nubileinnocent young women was aimed at a male audience. But then, most of my exposure to the genre is through bodycam channels or otherwise very red-tribe sources. Maybe I don’t have my finger on the pulse. Do you have examples in mind?You’ll probably find this unsurprising for a good reason, but I think it’s obvious that the people most likely to fantasize about rape, torture and murder are the ones most removed from the social reality of it, and this group in the West in general are suburban, middle-class women. The same phenomenon can be observed regarding the fandom around the Handmaid’s Tale, as it was discussed here on more than one occasion. They also the most likely to lap up feminist interpretations of crimes committed against women, which feminists are all too eager to provide.
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True crime's audience is super duper female. Red tribe men watch bodycam footage or cop shows(including reality) on broadcast TV/streaming, very different things. The fixation with innocent virgins being raped and murdered is totally aimed at a female audience; that's not what Cops is about(which is meth heads getting arrested in their underwear), or a frequent theme of non-porn male oriented entertainment.
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Wrong subthread?
dammit, yes
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It is probably true that the median teenaged girl who went no contact with her parents with no explanation or warning ran off with a boyfriend(probably one they didn’t like very much) and most of those will likely return when this proves to be a terrible idea. And that the police are mostly not there to stop individuals from making poor life decisions. But it is also true that that is a type of person and these girls are certainly portrayed as not that type.
The optimal number of drowned kids is not zero.
When parents report a missing daughter, it's in their interest to play up her virtues to get the police to move quicker. They are like real estate agents or used-car salesmen, they won't mention her trying to go on a spring break with her 25-yo unemployed "boyfriend" last year. The cops listen to the story of another paragon of innocence suddenly disappearing and are 99% sure the girl will call from another state within a week, begging her daddy to come pick her up because her now ex drove off with all her things still in the car.
Your argument proves too much. This is true in reporting just about any crime short of "the dead body is in front of me".
And dead bodies are what the police usually react the quickest to.
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Yeah, in order to judge law enforcement one would need to know the relative frequency of the runaway situation and the serial killer situation. To make an analogy, the doctor can't order a full blown battery of tests every time someone has an ache or a pain. Even though it's pretty much guaranteed that as a result of such a policy someone will miss out on early detection of a very serious medical issue.
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Also the sort of person that runs away randomly is probably going to overindex for the sort of life choices (Prostitution, Drugs, Hitchhiking) that strongly increase the chance of being disappeared.
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I agree with this post in the sense that I think the rate at which teenage runaways were actually the victim of crime matters for assessing the police's attitude towards these reports. It is not good epistemic hygiene to reason only from the cases where the police didn't take it seriously and the individual was actually victimized. On the other hand, I am not sure it is good epistemic hygiene to exonerate the police officers by imagining the rate was such that their actions were reasonable either.
In theory I agree, but in practice the degree of solicitude our society exhibits towards women and especially girls is such that I would be very surprised if it turned out that law enforcement has been under-reacting (in some general sense) towards these sorts of incidents.
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I think mostly back then, (1) people didn't have the same awareness of Bad Things (think of all the online anecdotes about 'when I was a kid, I could go out all day and be miles from home and my parents encouraged this versus today they won't even let the kids outside') (2) often, and maybe it was a mistaken assumption, the police worked off "if we do the whole 'missing person' thing after one night and call out everyone and do the big search, and then it turns out Susie just had a row with Mom and Dad over doing chores and went to stay with her friend Brenda and she came back in the morning, this will be a waste of everyone's time. Let's wait and see if Susie really is missing". And most kids from good families did show up the next morning. And the kids from broken homes, well, everyone knows this is their inevitable future.
We have a much different attitude to child rearing and danger today. I'm not saying one period was better or worse than the other, just that as attitudes change, we look back and go "Why did nobody think of the children? Something should have been done!" and for the people of that time, it would have been crazy to react like that. Comedy sketches about parenting then and now. Exaggeration about both eras, but yeah - back then (70s/80s) it was a lot looser.
They also just didn't think teenaged girls running off with older guys was a matter for, like, broader society to care about, and wrote these cases off as 'oh, boyfriend promises he'll give fewer beatings than daddy' #9000. My grandfather with the abusive stepfather had multiple (half)sisters run off with older guys instead of finishing high school during the time period in question, for the same reason a bunch of his (half)brothers joined the military as soon as they'd take 'em. Nobody thought they were making a decision which was either a) ideal or b) anything they had a say in. Some of these marriages even turned out OK(and in the 70's you could reasonably expect a marriage out of the deal, with the caveat that fitting into your dress might not be happening...).
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I saw a TV commercial (or PSA?) in 1978 touting a phone number (presumably a call-forwarding service or perhaps voicemail) that runaway teens could use to assure their parents that they were alive and in good health.
The commercial also said "No tricks, no traps, no traces." If this wasn't a lie, then the "youth-lib" movement was still strong enough that someone could create this service to help teens remain "free" of parental "tyranny" and that the TV station agreed to air the ad.
I mean, I doubt the people who made the service or accepted running the ads thought it was enabling anything? It can be just because getting news is way better for parents than none. And maybe, if you help create an indirect connection back to the parents like this, it can encourage eventually lead to a reconcilliation. At least I think the makers of this service and the TV stations can have the benefit of the doubt that this is how they thought about it.
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Crime was skyrocketing in the 1970s and 1980s and the vast majority of teenage runaways who went missing did so of their own accord and were not victims of serious crime. The interstate highway system, cheap oil and cars, buses and an economy where an unskilled worker (including a woman one) could support themselves and find employment in most places made it easier than in previous generations (I suspect ‘running far away from home’ and building a life as a teenager in 1870 was actually quite expensive and very difficult if one had no money or connections, even a lot of menial domestic work required references and people to vouch for you).
It makes sense, in that context, that the police focused on crimes that were definitely committed and victims they could identify and in most cases (that weren’t homicide) speak to.
Well, if we want to be fair, the word 'serious' is doing the heavy lifting here, depending on the level of seriousness involved, because I'm sure many of the teenage runaways, especially girls, were sexually assaulted, molested, trafficked, recruited to become drug smugglers or prostitutes etc., crimes which were generally never reported. I guess maybe the great majority of them turned into average employees in the service sector, but I'm not sure about that.
Also, wasn't the period after 1973 one of stagflation and high unemployment? Surely it wasn't as bad as today for unskilled manual workers, but still.
Er... you thought room and board were free? The actors were making rational tradeoffs here; that's kind of why they were never reported.
(Just like the groupies, for that matter, but in a slightly different way.)
Assuming female hypoagency here (and conflating teenagers with children, which you do further below) is a mistake; I believe the meme was "I was young and needed the money". That is the labor they offer to get things that they want. Marriage is kind of the same way, just longer-term.
Complaining about this is just an isolated demand for rigor around sex, which in an environment of equality is incorrect.
OP claimed ‘the vast majority of teenage runaways who went missing did so of their own accord and were not victims of serious crime’. In the sense that the vast majority of them probably never fell victim to murder and were thus never mentioned in various true crime stories about serial killers, that is correct. I pointed out though that probably a large number of them were victimized in other ways, ways that are technically crimes even if many of the teenage victims made up their minds from the moment they ran away to turn into drug mules and prostitutes (which is possible but doesn’t seem likely), crimes that are usually considered serious in the mainstream.
I’d say the main reason was that teenage runaways were aware that trying to report a rape or assault to the police was likely to be a futile effort on their part.
I believe this meme usually refers to young women – that is, young adults – who did porn or posed for titty mags while in college, usually with no outside pressure being involved, so the situation is slightly different.
Again, those are normally adults. I know it’s sort of a fad among third-wave feminists to bring up the horrible reality of so-called baby groupies, but this is still a fact.
No, I mentioned (teenaged) children in the context of children of traumatized war veterans running away.
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Date rape and statutory were not seen as serious crimes in the seventies.
What did you think was in the back of the van, ice-cream and candy?
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