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Notes -
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.
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.
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