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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Date rape and statutory were not seen as serious crimes in the seventies.
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