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Notes -
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.
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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