Lorna Ferguson is a Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Regina and founder of the Missing Persons Research Hub, a North America-wide initiative that centralizes missing persons research, resources, policy, and support for researchers, practitioners, and families. Her work focuses on bridging the gap between academic research and real-world practice to improve responses to missing persons cases.
In this episode we talk about:
- How the Missing Persons Research Hub grew out of frustration that innovative policing, research, and community initiatives were being developed in isolation.
- How simple community-based interventions can significantly reduce missing persons reports.
- The differences between missing persons investigations and criminal investigations.
- The ongoing tension between police and families of missing persons, how both share the same goal of locating a loved one but operate under very different legal, operational, and emotional realities.
- The opportunities and ethical challenges of using artificial intelligence in missing persons investigations.
- Why Canada urgently needs comprehensive national missing persons data, how inconsistent data collection limits research and policy development, and why understanding who goes missing—and why—depends on collecting better, more consistent information across jurisdictions.
- How the rise of true crime media has created a distorted public understanding of missing persons, the harm that speculation and sensationalism can cause to families.
You can contact Lorna via email: lorna.ferguson@uregina.ca
Missing Persons Research Hub: https://www.missingpersonsresearchhub.com/
Missing Persons: Beyond Serial Killers and Unexplained Disappearances (2026)
Police responses to cold and long-term missing person cases: a comparative study (2024) International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.
Training police search and rescue teams: Implications for missing persons work (2023) Criminology & Criminal Justice
Transcript
Yvonne: So Lorna, welcome. Please introduce yourself and tell us where you are and what your role is.
Lorna: Well, thank you for having me. I’m really, really happy to be here. I am Lorna Ferguson. I’m a professor at the University of Regina in the Department of Criminology. I’m also the founder of the North America-wide research organization called the Missing Persons Research Hub, and that’s where you and I have connected. It’s on all things missing persons for the field. It’s got a research database, a blog, a podcast, a support forum for families and loved ones, and I think we’ll be talking about that a little bit more today. But yeah, I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to talk about all of my research related to missing persons.
Yvonne: Fabulous. Yeah, I didn’t even know such a thing existed. I’m very, very happy it exists. So why don’t you tell us how it kind of came to be? Because it’s all very new.
Lorna: It is new. Yeah. Well, I’ve been doing work in the field for the better part of six or seven years at that point, and it was 2019, and I was getting frustrated.
I was getting kind of annoyed because I was having so many important meetings with different people doing really cool things and really innovative things and things that can help other people, and I’d ask the simple question, have you shared this with ex-police service or shared this with these other researchers doing kind of the same thing but in a different region? And the response was always quite flat. It was always no, like we’ve been kind of working on this in our space for a number of years now, and we’re trying to get more done. And I said to a lot of people that I talked with in consultation when I was starting it, like, have you considered centralizing this? Have you considered sharing it? And most people got excited at that idea. They were like, yeah, I would love to. I think that this can have more of an impact if it could reach more people. And I’m one of those people that are builders. I love to build. I see a problem. I’m solving it. It’s quite simple for me. And so I saw a problem, right? I saw lots of cool things going on across mostly Canada, but then I branched out into the US and, you know, harnessing that frustration into something really, really valuable.
And so the Missing Persons Research Hub kind of spawned from a problem, I guess, and it solves that problem to centralize all research, all resources, all information, all knowledge translation, all access to researchers. And so come 2020, I launched it in January. And it’s grown legs over the years.
It’s six years in now. And it gets thousands and thousands of hits. It’s being cited in the media. I’ve got students working on some stuff now. So students are getting opportunities, people are getting opportunities to publish. And so it was by me, of course. But it’s not about me at all. It’s about the field. It’s for the community.
It’s for people to bring everything together to share with others so that they have that portal, I guess, or that bridge to meet the other side, to meet other people doing cool things or to meet other regions doing innovative policy or to meet other support organizations and community groups that are doing this work and advocating for the missing persons field. And so it’s constantly developing. It’s getting new iterations.
Every single year, I do a full audit of the site and see what’s working and what’s not and what’s missing to make sure it’s always up to date for people so that it is actually useful. And then other than that, you know, it’s just there. It just lives and people can use it as they’d like and join it as they’d like and take part as they’d like. If they want to do more, they’re welcome to, and if they want to do less, they’re welcome to as well.
So, yeah, it’s been a big passion project for me because I’m one of those researchers that doesn’t like to just have things sit there. And what I mean by that is, let’s say I write a research article, it gets published, and then it sits there. Maybe it’s cited by five or 10 people. Maybe two people read it. Who knows, it’s just sitting there and I see the value beyond that. I think it needs to access the populations that the work affects. I think it needs to get into the hands of governments and policymakers. I think it needs to be shared by and with other folks in the field so that we can all benefit from it, right?
So, that goes back to that builder idea, I guess, or the builder personality that I have that I don’t want things to just sit there. I want to be able to action them and make them useful for people. And that’s been my researcher identity too, and everything that I do, it’s about giving back.
So, the long story short, it’s there for everyone, and it’s there to give back, and it’s there to centralize everything that I can find, and everyone else that finds things, that sends it my way so that people can really benefit from all of the cool things going on across the field for the missing persons phenomenon.
Yvonne: So, let’s dig into some of that, I guess, founding material that prompted you to build this site. You said you were talking to people and finding out about cool new things. Who were these people, and what were these cool new things? Because it sounds very grassroots. Yes, yes.
Lorna: I love this question. A couple of them. So, there was one police service that I was having a chat with back in Ontario, and they noticed a problem.
They noticed that people were going missing from group homes in their cities at alarming rates. And so, around 30%, just above 30% of their missing persons reports were coming from just a couple of group homes in the city. That’s a lot year over year, right?
You have to think about the fact that people that are living at group homes, specifically children and youth, are already vulnerable. So, not only is it a quantity problem, but it’s also a vulnerability problem, right? And so, this police service noticed this issue, and they had a problem-oriented policing project going, and they started a project on specifically this issue.
And so, one of their officers, they would go and pick up a couple of pizzas from Little Caesars, and they would get a couple of bottles of pop, and they would go on Fridays for three months to this one particular group home that was particularly problematic in terms of their report numbers, and talk to the youth and say, hey, how’s it going? Here’s my number. Let me know if you’re going to take off. Send me a text so that I know you’re safe and well. Give me your location. Here’s what goes on when you go missing or you don’t return for curfew.
Here’s what happens to the staff. Here’s what happens from a policing perspective. Here’s what we’re concerned about. And also, it was just informal, right? Like, making youth less afraid of law enforcement. Law enforcement are humans too. We’re here to help. We’re not here to hurt. We’re not here to punish.
We want to get you away from being in contact with the system, not in contact with the system. Anyway, so they ran this project for three months, and over the course of that three-month problem-oriented policing project, they saw a reduction in about 19 percent of reports. And listen, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but that over time, as it accumulates, amasses thousands of people not going missing. And I’m, like, that’s a cool idea, right? This is how simple, right? Twenty dollars for pizza and pop. You take an hour once a week to go and just have a chat as a part of your community engagement with this particular group of people that you’re interacting with in a negative sense when they go missing.
Now, let’s switch it to a positive sense. Have you shared this? Have you talked to other people about this? Have you discussed this with other police services? Because the youth runaways from group homes phenomenon is actually at crisis levels in Canada here.
What are you doing with it? No, we’re not doing anything, and we’re probably not going to continue it after this three-month trial period. And I was, oh, why? Why? And can I share? Can I tell people? Let me be the person that broadcasts it. And of course, I got permission to do that, but that was one of them, and that was for a police initiative.
And then another researcher initiative, I was speaking with researchers, and they were building a response app. And that meant that people that went missing, they were going into this response app, and it was doing a risk factor and risk assessment analysis to help with directing vulnerability experiences so that responders could triage, so to speak, or prioritize when people were going missing, where to direct resources, and how quickly to direct those resources. And I’m, like, okay, cool. That’s amazing. Are you sharing that? And the answer was no. And then again, another bunch of…
Yvonne: Sorry, Lorna, could you give an example with that response app?
Lorna: Yeah, so let’s say person A, they go missing, and they have seven out of the 15 vulnerability factors. And the vulnerability factors included things like age-related vulnerability, weather-related vulnerability, meaning they weren’t wearing the right clothes for the weather at the time. Another set of factors included mental health considerations. Another included disability considerations. For example, are they experiencing Alzheimer’s and dementia or cognitive impairment? Another included medication-related vulnerability, as in if they’re gone for more than X number of hours, is it going to be a health concern, specifically for people with heart problems or diabetes, for example.
And so they triaged a bunch of different risk factors, graded it on a scale, and then it would pop out an output in terms of what percentage of concern and percentage of response and resources. And that response and resources function was tiered along two lines. It was first, urgency, so it generated an urgency score, and second, volume, as in volume of resources. So should more police resources be dedicated to this because it’s a high-risk or high-vulnerability case? Should the police be responding very quickly because it’s a high-risk, high-vulnerability case?
And so it, I guess, generated a score, and that takes away some of those subjectivity concerns that we’ve seen with police response issues in that human error, human judgment, human subjectivity, human bias can affect the response to certain missing persons cases, particularly for, we know for Indigenous women and girls, we know for youth runaways, we know for people that the police consider in high-risk lifestyles like sex trade workers and transientness and homelessness. And so it removes that. It outputs a score. And that was in a trial run the last time I heard about it.
It was going through several iterations, and they were in touch at the time with, after chatting with me, they got in touch with a couple of police services down in the US too to see what they can do with that. But anyways, yeah, it was super cool. And it changed that conversation from risk assessment to response assessment, because I’ve had challenges with that language of risk assessment in the field, and they recognized the same issues.
So yeah, it was another cool project going on. I’m like, okay, we need to do more here. Like, how can I bring this knowledge together and get it out there?
Because the reality is, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing good work in your area, if you’re not sharing it, right? If you’re not sharing it, and people don’t know about it, what’s the point, right? So yeah, those are two examples.
And there’s a bunch, there’s a ton, there’s a lot of innovation going on in the field. You yourself, with what you’ve started, the projects that you have going on are phenomenal. And I didn’t know about them until I found you.
So it’s part of that sharing so that we can benefit all model, you know?
Yvonne: Absolutely. And I know what you mean about the, especially in an academic setting, where it is about publishing and peer reviewed journals, and you know, the tenure promotion process. It isn’t a focus on making a change in the world, which is probably what you got into research for in the first place is making a change in the world. Because the tenure promotion process, you just publish and then it sits on a shelf somewhere, usually behind a paywall. And so whoever you want to impact, doesn’t know it exists, and they can’t access it. So why bother?
Lorna: It’s a tension, right? There’s two, it is, there’s a tension, I would say two approaches, I’m making it very simplified, but two approaches to academic research. The first being that, right, you’re generating research for the research community on several factors, and it might have an impact on policy and practice at some point somewhere, but the aim is more so doing research for research. And there’s a space for that. We need that in the scientific community, we need science, right? That’s true.
I don’t take that approach. And that’s something I’ve actually faced issues with over the course of my career is I do things very differently. And a lot of academics don’t know what to do with me, because I’m unfiltered, and I’m rough around the edges, and I have a particular appearance, and I’m very community engaged, and vocal.
And I’m a builder, like I said, I don’t do it to sit behind in academic journals and get promoted, I do it for a different purpose. That’s where I draw my value. I don’t do it for academic merit, academic award. And so if that stuff comes, I’m happy for that. But that’s not my priority. And so I’ve actually had to navigate that.
And it’s been interesting, it’s been an interesting journey to figure out how I can fit in a space that I don’t necessarily fit in, and still do the things that I want to do and have those things be enough to keep me in the academic community, if that makes sense.
Yvonne: Absolutely. Yeah. And I love that you’ve found a way to, well, you’ve identified a problem, you found a way to address the problem by building this site and kind of centralizing all these resources and information. And just get out there and make the impact that you want to make. Yeah. Yeah. Especially, the type of people you’re dealing with, you can actually see the impact when you’re having it, because these, like you said, that 19% reduction, that’s massive, huge.
Lorna: And again, I think that would trickle down after they finish that really targeted engagement portion. I still think, though, that year after year — and I’m hypothesizing this is I don’t know if this is true — but I would imagine that the relationships are still there. And I can imagine that the same officers are still in connection with the same people.
And I can imagine that that is still creating, you know, ripple effects, reductions, you know, year after year, and maybe it’s not as much, but even 1%, I would welcome that. I would welcome half a percent. I would welcome as little percent as possible, if it meant that less people were going missing, and less people were experiencing the possibility of vulnerability, harm, victimization, and even death, right? Death related to going missing, as you know, is the ultimate concern here, right?
It’s the ultimate concern that we want to prevent and reduce over time.
Yvonne: Right. And so, okay, on that point, because I was making my way through an article that you wrote in 2024, “Police responses to cold and long-term missing person cases: a comparative study” in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. And one thing that I wasn’t completely familiar with, which may be common sense, but of course, I’m very much in the death side of things, is that there’s a difference between a missing persons case, and a criminal case, or a cold case, and also long-term missing person case, and a real live criminal cold case.
So if we could kind of talk about those definitions and break that out a little bit, that would be great.
Lorna: Happy to. Okay. So in the system, from a police perspective, when it turns cold or long term, those two are very ambiguous. And so for police services across Canada, what it means for it to be a cold case, and what it means for it to be a long term case, varies, no one’s established a definition that can be, you know, helpful, so to speak.
And so cold case for police, mostly across Canada means that investigative leads have dried up, and some amount of time has passed that they consider it that moving into an inactive or passive investigation stage. A long-term case tends to have some type of time criteria. So after 90 days, or after one year, and again, that varies across police services, there’s no standard for what is a cold missing persons case, or a long term missing persons case.
But at some point, from a policing perspective, operationally, a case will traverse into that category. Typically, when three things are met, the first being there’s no new leads, right? Investigative leads have dried up, there’s not a lot of new information coming to light, and there’s little, you know, witness or other identifications coming forward. The second thing is time, time related considerations. If a certain number of months have gone by, if a certain number of days in certain police services, even if it’s a certain number of years, right? Point being, some longer amount of time has to pass for it to be considered a cold or long-term case. And then the third thing is it’s moving into a different investigation phase, let’s call it. And so there’s three really main types of investigative stages for missing persons reports. The first one is active.
We see that all the time, that’s when you’re in the public are seeing missing persons appeals going out, they’re soliciting information, they’re knocking on doors, maybe they’ve got search and rescue out in the field looking for clues in the person themselves. Active means just that they’re doing stuff, they’re actively involved in casework, witness identification, evidence tracing, video surveillance, clue markers, you know, different volunteers can be involved. There’s a lot of different investigative tasks that they can take on.
In the active phase, there’s two types of styles of investigation. The first is non-criminal. And so what a lot of people don’t understand is that missing persons reports are not criminal code violations. You can go missing at any time. And legally, you have the right to do that as a capable adult. And so when we think about what the police are responsible for, they’re law enforcement. And when there’s no law violation, they actually have limited power, limited investigative authority to do much for non-criminal cases. And I’ll give you some examples.
Miscommunications. My partner was supposed to be home at this number, or this time, and they’ve not come home and their cell phone is off. The partner is actually stuck in traffic, their cell phone has died, they can’t get in touch with their partner. But there’s a miscommunication there. We don’t know where the person is. I’m concerned because it’s an out of character behavior, but really, they’re not missing, they’re just stuck in traffic, right?
Youth runaways kind of fit into that miscommunication category if they’re just not returning to the group home in time for curfew. That’s the youth not letting the group home know that they’re going to be home, they’re just going to be late. But because of group home policy, they have to initiate a missing person’s report because of the curfew designation, meaning, hey, this person’s not where they’re expected to be. Okay.
Another type of category in the non-criminal is wandering. So this is particularly related to older adults with cognitive impairments. So, again, Alzheimer’s and dementia, they’re confused, disoriented, and they leave their home. And so they’re wandering until they get stuck, or they’re wandering until someone stops them, or they’re wandering to a familiar location, like their previous house addresses or their favorite shops. And so that fits in that non-criminal category as well. And there’s a lot of different types of missing persons reports that fit in that.
And for the majority of missing persons reports, they are non-criminal incidents. And so that’s the bulk of police work in this area. That’s the bulk of active investigation work, where police are trying to respond to a call for service in an area that they’re not necessarily legally kind of responsible for, right? It’s a weird area, let’s call it. They are responsible for because they’re responsible for anything that the community thinks that they’re responsible for. And there is legislation now called the Missing Persons Act that gives police more authority in this area.
But nonetheless, it’s not a legal violation. So they’re navigating that tension in their efforts. So that’s one active investigation domain. And that’s challenging because they’re trying to conduct investigative work with having less authority and less power to do so because it’s not criminal, right? It’s not a criminal incident.
Switching to the second side, which is the criminal incident category. Those make up a small proportion of missing persons reports, but they are significant. These are the cases linked to foul play, linked to human trafficking, linked to domestic violence, linked to child abduction and kidnapping. And so these are the cases that are, of course, extremely concerning. They’re high risk. There’s a high chance of adverse outcome. And there’s a grave concern when we can find out that there’s foul play connections.
The reality, though, is that when police take missing persons reports, it’s very unlikely that they’ll recognize there is foul play connections until quite later on into active investigation efforts as they uncover more information, right? One of the cases I worked on was a father reporting his daughter missing. And he was trying to explain to the police that I think my wife took her. I would think my wife took her back to Vietnam. This is an abduction case. My wife doesn’t have legal custodian status of my daughter. I’m concerned, I’m concerned. But police can’t do much with that until they themselves uncover information that shows that, right? So they have to be careful because it could be an angry father reporting his wife and children and trying to stir up.
They don’t know, point being. And so that was a really challenging case to work on because it did end up being that that was an abduction case. And the police had jurisdictional issues trying to get the daughter back to safety when the daughter was in Vietnam and he was in Canada, okay? That’s a criminal incident. Police have tons of legal authority and investigative ability for active work in criminal cases. And they’re working on getting more ability in the non-criminal cases.
But those are the two buckets that work for active investigation techniques, okay? Now, both criminal and non-criminal cases can traverse into cold or long-term status. They absolutely can. The highest chance from my research of them traversing into cold and long-term is when it’s foul play related though. It’s not common for non-criminal cases to go into a cold or long-term status. Most often, people return or are located within 48 hours when it comes to non-criminal cases. That’s the majority. I’m talking like 70% above. Most recent statistics show more than 90% of cases are resolved within the first 48 hours, right?
Resolved being they return home, police find them, they go back to the group home by, you know, later curfew date. Point being, they’re resolved quite quickly. And so, what we’re seeing when we look at cold cases is criminal connection for the most part.
And this is where your work comes in, locating human remains, for example, persons deceased related to misadventure, persons deceased related to criminal connection, persons deceased related to drownings. That’s a big connection here in Canada because of the water bodies around us. And those are challenging.
And so, what the police will do is for the longest time possible, they’ll keep it in an active investigation stage. And I want to be clear, active investigation is not the same as open investigation. Cold and long-term cases are always in an open investigation stage while they’re unresolved.
They will always have someone looking over the file, involved with the file, looking for new technologies and new leads. But that’s the role of the police kind of switches when it gets to cold and long-term cases over time. Think cases that have been unresolved for 20 plus years, police cannot be dedicating active resources to that all the time, right?
So, they need to move into different phases because those different phases give different perspectives and different opportunities, right? And so, active for some amount of time, they will try and keep it in an active investigation stage as long as possible. Again, the case will always stay open, but it can move into what’s called a passive investigation stage. And that’s where police are trying to still work on it, but through other means. So, submitting DNA or dental information to different databanks, they’re putting out missing persons appeals or keeping a tip line open. Really, they’re waiting for information to come to them.
That’s that passive stage. So, they’re trying any efforts that they can, but they’re doing it less from them and more from waiting for other people to come to them or waiting for hits to come through those banks, the dental and DNA databanks. They’re looking for new tools and technologies that can be used and just generally trying, but not as forceful, let’s call it, as the active phase. That tends to be the middle ground. So, we’re talking cases that are a couple years out between that and, let’s say, getting into the 10 plus years. There’s not a clear timeline, but point being within that middle years, as cases are cold and long term, they tend to be in the passive stage, waiting for information to come to light, waiting for new leads, new information.
The final phase that they tend to move into if they’ve gone on for years and years and years and nothing new is coming, there’s no new technologies, there’s nothing that can be done is that they’ll move into an inactive stage. They’ve used up all their tools and technologies, all the DNA, all the dental that they can access with the family’s permission has been submitted to the databanks. Everything really has been done.
So, there’s not much more that the police can do other than keep the file open and hope something comes up, wait for a new hit, new DNA stored, new DNA submitted. They can wait for new technologies to come through and keep the case in mind for those new technologies. But point being at that stage, what can the police do?
If you look at the cold cases available on the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains, there’s cases that are from 1904, 1946, 1960. You have to think, what can we do here? Regardless, if the person’s not found, they’re still missing, right? And so it’s still an open case. And so we will keep it open as long as we possibly can.
And we have seen especially with, you know, the new era we’re in with true crime, docuseries showcasing cases that have been resolved decades later, because they’ve been kept open. And new evidence comes to light, new crimes are committed, new DNA is taken, new information or witnesses come forward to reveal information that helps these cases get closed and bring the family closure. So yeah, I will digress.
At this point, I’ve been ranting, but the three phases are fluid. They’re not, it’s not that they stay there. And it’s not that they’re at 10 years, we’re moving into this phase. It’s not how it works. It’s fluid, it’s ongoing, it’s a constant re-evaluation process. And regardless, again, to emphasize the cases will always stay open until they can be closed from a policing perspective.
Yvonne: Because the tension, sorry, the tension that the public, I guess, always hears about is when somebody goes missing, the family suspects something and they start saying something. But there’s no evidence for the police to suspect that the missing person is missing, involving some sort of criminal activity. So they remain a missing person’s case.
And so there’s always that tension. And so when you describe that the missing persons, the way that that case is working and that the police, because they’re law enforcing, they have very little jurisdiction. Then that makes sense that, yeah, unless they find reason to believe that there’s some sort of criminal activity or something involved, there’s limited what they can do.
Lorna: Absolutely. And it’s tough because I’ve worked with families and loved ones a lot. They’re always why I do the work that I do.
For example, if I do policing research, it’s to improve policing to help families and loved ones, right? And so I understand their tensions. They’re frustrated, right? They know more sometimes than what the police know. But there’s a dynamic here where there’s two different aims, right? The families and loved ones and the police come together under the desire to find the person, right?
That’s what they share. But the police are taking it from an operational law enforcement, legal and policy perspective in terms of what they can do, because we have laws in Canada that protect our right to go missing. We have privacy laws as well that protect our right to go missing and not tell anyone, right? So as capable adults, unless there’s a vulnerability concern, guess what? I can close my laptop and never talk to you or anyone again today. And nothing can be done about that. And of course, my utilities company might be upset that I’m not paying my bills anymore. But point being, I can legally do that and the police have little ability to bring me back, okay? From the family’s perspective, they don’t agree. Of course they don’t agree. They want their loved one home. I get that. I understand that. And that’s going to be a continued tension that the police and families and loved ones will face.
Police want to do things by the book as they need to. That’s their job. And the families just want their loved one home at any cost. And so the families want all resources, all guns blazing, everything dedicated, and that’s not often the reality.
And so some of the conversations I’ve been having is just sharing what goes on from the policing perspective when these cases are initiated and then what happens moving on into the future. And it’s bringing that reality and it’s uncomfortable. It’s not a comfortable conversation, but bringing that reality into the conversation so that there can be an understanding from both parties, right? Again, I do the same with police is coaching on families and loved ones experiences and perspectives. So anyways, it’s an ongoing tension. And I want to be very clear.
I think the police are doing a bit of a shit job in terms of engaging families and loved ones in these cases. And so some of that tension is created by bad process and bad policy and not enough resources dedicated to that family and loved one function. And so some of that tension doesn’t need to be there, right? But some of it will exist regardless. The police could be doing everything right in terms of engaging the families and loved ones in the case and community engagement, etc, etc. All resources still dedicated to it.
And there will always be that difference in perspective because of the functions of these different parties, right? And so part of the work that I’ve done is just that education component to get people to understand, hey, listen, we all have the common goal, okay? We’re not working against each other, even though it might feel that way at times, right? And some of that feeling is very fair. What can we do to get aligned? What can we do to improve our communication? What can we do to understand each other in our efforts towards this common goal, right?
Yvonne: And I’m guessing if the family has resources, that’s probably one of the reasons why they would hire a private investigator.
Lorna: Exactly. I mean, let’s talk about the families and loved ones. They become the investigators for the case. They become the archivists. They become advocates. They become the policymakers.
I’ve seen them in legislative buildings advocating for improved policy here. They really become the champions of their loved one and they always will be. And one of the conversations that really has stuck with me over the years, so I was in a family and loved one support group.
I was invited to guest speak. And we were talking about the issues with policing. And there was also a police officer in that group who was sharing her perspective. She’s very seasoned, decades worth of experience in missing persons work. And there was a hostile air. It was tense in certain ways.
And I understand that. And I was just kind of being a wallflower to understand this dynamic and see what people have to say. And one of the family members spoke up and she said, you know, here’s all the issues. Why? Why? Why does this exist, basically?
And for context, her loved one was her brother, who had been historically transient, definitely longer bouts of homelessness. And so her main issue with police was related to the stigma of that. What can you do for people experiencing transientness? How can you get them back socially connected? And so the police officer, she was responding with as much information as she could sharing the police process. Here’s what happens. Here’s all that we can do when people are socially disconnected.
It’s a tough issue because people experiencing homelessness move around a lot. They don’t have a good way to connect with them. It’s kind of like a closed unit in for homeless communities. They don’t want police popping their heads trying to have conversations with them.
And then the final comment the police officer said was, but if not the police, then who? Who would help? Who would respond?
And the family member stopped and took a pause and then responded, we can and we always will, the families. And I sat with that and I’m, like, yes, yes, of course. But what about the people that don’t have family that can advocate for them that don’t have the family resources that don’t have the family personnel?
We need a safety net and the safety net will have to be the police, right? We can’t rely on family members to do this on their own resources, on their own time when they don’t have jurisdictional access, authoritative access, legal access to certain things. And that’s that reality, and so it’s a great example of that tension.
Families think they can, they do, they will, but there’s thousands of people that don’t have families that could do that for them, that have families that are not in the same region as them, that have families that don’t have that level of resources and time, that have families that don’t want anything to do with them, or they don’t want anything to do with their families. That don’t have family members anymore due to death, right?
And so you can’t have families be the safety net, but they will always be, wherever possible and wherever willing, the champions for these cases as they traverse into cold and long-term status. And especially in the beginning, they play such a pivotal role in the police investigation process to give over information and access and known locations and friends and associates and social media information and just generally help the investigation. But the point being though, we will need a safety net and that safety net at the moment, and maybe forever, will be police and the police process and the police response.
And so wherever possible, again, it’s getting these minds, these perspectives together to see where we can get aligned, but I would love it if we had a better system for this, whatever that means. I just don’t know how to get there because there’s so many pain points, let’s call it so many tensions, errors of hostility, like I said, in that support group. I would encourage a perspective of how can we get together and figure this out versus, you did all this wrong and you suck, from either perspective.
Yvonne: That doesn’t get anybody anywhere.
Lorna: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Yvonne: So what are, I don’t know, maybe the top three or five hot topics do you think in this area of missing persons?
Lorna: Well, I honestly, just a couple of months ago would have answered this question differently, but now I would say I’ve seen a lot of people trying to push for AI. AI in missing persons, for different functions.
So one function I’ve seen it coming through for is for case linkage. So using the cold case database information and seeing if there’s overlaps in terms of characteristics, locations that they’ve gone missing, known times, known associates, seeing if there’s any ways that we can connect the dots on these cases to look at more patterns.
I support that function. I think that’s a fantastic use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to try and bring more information to light and look at patterns. It’s one of the major faults with the police that they don’t do case linkage well.
However, I’ve seen quite a lot of work now trying to leverage AI for risk assessment when it comes to these cases. And what that looks like is kind of what we talked about for the response assessment app, but using AI, not human intelligence to do it. And so you spit in characteristics of the case, and then AI does a predictive assessment and spits out the likelihood of the case being resolved.
That’s one of the functions I’ve seen. Or AI does an assessment to spit out the likelihood of this case experiencing harm, and therefore the police can do less for the case if this AI assessment determines that there’s less risk, less chance of the case experiencing harm, vulnerability, victimization, death. And I am, just to be very transparent, very challenged, very challenged by this, because let’s talk it through, right? If AI is used to input a bunch of case characteristics for me, and spits out a score of me, the chance of my case being resolved is low. So police then direct less resources to that case. Here’s the conundrum.
The reality for cases being resolved, there’s a correlation between the volume of police resources being dedicated to the case being resolved. And so if you, an algorithm determines that low risk of being, or low chance of being resolved, don’t direct resources to this, it’s self-fulfilling. Then the case is less likely to be resolved. And so I don’t agree with that.
I think we need much more ethical considerations when it comes to using AI for vulnerable populations. And the conversation needs to be had that you can put all of my case characteristics in, and it can put out a low risk or a low chance of being resolved, and it can be wrong.
It happens all the time, where case characteristics show no chance of vulnerability, this is out of character, but you know, this person, you know, they’re not operating in a, you know, vulnerable social identities. And so low risk here, let’s just see what happens and try and get in touch with people and find her. But it ends up that I’m being, I’ve been abducted, and I’m I end up dead, right?
With missing persons, the reality is it can happen to anyone, right? Anyone can go missing, anyone can experience adverse outcomes, if we’re not careful, we don’t have a good way to assess risk in these cases. Because of exactly that, you know, situations are not necessarily predictable in this way.
And so let’s not do AI for that, please. Let’s think about a different approach, perhaps. Or let’s think about what the families and loved ones would think about that if you use this AI, and then the police say, okay, well, then I’m not going to dedicate as much resources to this.
What do we think about that from a community and community perspective? So that was, I would say that’s one topical area. And I would say that topical area is true across every industry right now, is how to leverage AI to improve efficiency and effectiveness. But when we’re talking about vulnerability and human behavior, I would urge as much caution as possible. And, you know, let’s tease out some ethical considerations for that.
The second major conversation happening is data. And for folks listening, there’s no national database in Canada on missing persons incidents, we don’t have what the US has. The US has the NAM US, which is a centralized repository of all police reports of missing persons that is publicly available. We don’t have that here in Canada, there’s no national database, no national information, we don’t have statistics on the number of incidents, what populations are going missing, what the probable cause of these cases is, what the regional distribution is, what the representation in these cases is. We don’t even collect race and ethnicity data on missing persons incidents consistently across police services. And so how do we understand the patterns and the scope of the problem and the vulnerability considerations and the different groups that are high risk and that are going missing most often, unless we have data? If we don’t have data, we don’t know, we really are just operating blind here.
We don’t know, we don’t know what the reality of missing persons is in Canada, if we don’t have such information. And so there’s efforts going on across the nation to somehow get a picture of the problem. And so we’ve got search and rescue groups, they’re starting to collect their own data to figure out what operationally their volume of responses and the types of cases that they’re brought into.
We’ve got the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains working on improving their fast fact sheets, which is CPIC, or Canadian Police Information Centre reports. I’ve been very critical of the usefulness of that data, but nonetheless, they’re working on refining and improving it. And that’s very valuable, very important to do.
And we’ve got some police services coming to the table to figure out how we can have a regional perspective on the missing persons problem by giving data somehow. And that takes me to how I’ve done my research. My research has been based on relationships with police services and police services being willing to share data, but that generates, I would say, three or four problems.
First, being that the data access is built upon the police service being willing to share. So the police then hold the record and gatekeep access to that. Second, only certain researchers can access that information.
And so we’re lacking diverse perspectives and diverse access to that data. And of course, I’m very happy that I have it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it should be shared more broadly.
Third, we’re getting an institutional record of the problem, not a reality picture of the problem. And so this goes to the conversations we’re having, police are collecting information only from an operational perspective, they’re not collecting it for research purposes. And so the quality of information and police records is shit, just to be honest. And so I spent so much time just cleaning data to make it work and make it clear and make it accurate. But we’re missing information from a lived experience perspective, from a family and loved one experience perspective. We’re getting an institutional record perspective. And that limits the knowledge that we have on the missing persons problem, right? When we look at it from a policing lens, we’re going to get research output from a policing lens, right? If that makes sense.
Perhaps I’ll throw in the fourth problem, and that there’s data ceilings, I call it, or data limits to what this knowledge can give. We’re going to hit a ceiling when we use this institutional record. We can only see what police make available. And that means that if they’re not collecting race and ethnicity data consistently, we’re not going to see how different races and ethnicities experience this problem. If they’re collecting probable cause information on their categories, so they create three truncated categories being runaway, no concern, or ELOP, that’s the three probable cause categories that they tend to capture missing persons incidents in. Okay, but what about all the other type types of missing persons cases, right? These are ceilings, these are limits to what we can understand about missing persons.
And so I again, it is valuable, we need this record, but we need more information. And so going back to my point, the second main area is data. We need data. We need data to understand the problem, to give voice to different groups and experiences, to give public education to start conversations on prevention, and reduction, and to move the conversation into a more grounded reality of the problem. And then the third area, and this is an area I’m really pushing for, is we are at a crossroads right now with missing persons: we’re slowly slipping into a true crime reality versus a lived reality understanding.
And so it goes back to the first two issues, but the main one being the second one that we don’t have data, so we can’t understand the problem. And when we have that issue, pair it with the fact that police are not often sharing clear and accurate information publicly on the realities, that researchers are not doing community engaged work, and so their work is sitting behind these paywall journals and not centralized. This is a really full summary going full circle back to the things that we’ve talked about in this podcast.
What fills those gaps is the true crime genre. The true crime genre being the Netflix docuseries, and the TikTokers and the podcasters talking about missing persons. And missing persons cases don’t fit neatly with the true crime genre because there’s not always a crime occurring. But the reality is, because it’s the true crime genre, it’s being viewed through a mystery, paranoia, criminal connection lens, and it’s being publicly broadcast that way. And so there’s a skewed reality right now about what missing persons actually is, and we’re seeing such a small sliver of the reality through this perspective, because that’s what the public are hearing. They’re hearing from true crime content creators, docuseries, podcasts on missing persons cases, not from the people that have professional lived and researcher experience and expertise. And so they’re getting publicly misinformation and disinformation on missing persons. It’s vast, it’s profound.
And while missing persons cases don’t fit neatly, because they’re not a criminal, often a criminal case, that gives narrative, you know, suspense, mystery, it’s like that, you know, what could have happened? Maybe this, maybe that. And so the speculation has been having profound impacts on families and loved ones, that if the cases reach the true crime community and high profile, you know, broadcast, then there’s quite a lot of harmful effects for families and loved ones when it comes to speculation, theory building, web sleuthing, invasiveness, lack of privacy, you know, misconstrued, them getting scapegoated, them getting targeted, them getting, you know, blamed, for example.
And so the third area that is highly important to what I’m doing right now is tackling that, trying to more publicly educate on the missing persons problem, trying to encourage folks to be ethical consumers of content online, trying to encourage people to look up evidence-informed or evidence-based information, trying to think, get people to say, Hey, how would I feel if this was my brother, my mother, my sister, my child that went missing, and it was being broadcast in this way, spoken about this way with these people talking about it, and these people prying, what would I do? And how would I feel? Or even alternatively, what if it was me? What if it was my picture and my information, and my life, and my story and my history? How would I feel?
And I think that that has helped some people. Maybe I’m hoping I don’t know, but I would, I hope that it’s helped some people have a little bit more empathy when they’re engaging with true crime content, but that remains to be seen. And so a portion of the work I’m moving into is obviously public education to tackle some of these myths and speculations, but also carving a research body that speaks to this.
And one of my recently published books is called Missing Persons Beyond Serial Killers and Unexplained Disappearances. And it does just that. It critiques, it questions, it challenges, it improves, it positions what the missing persons problem is behind the curtain of what we see currently, which is mostly driven through true crime sensationalism.
So yeah, I would say those are the three main areas. And people are doing different things for those three main areas, different approaches, different research spaces, but I think they’re the most important conversations that we need as we move into this next era with the crossroads that we’re at when it comes to the missing persons problem.
Yvonne: Wow, you’ve completely blown my mind. I had no idea. The only thing that I can attest to that is that I’ve been looking at AI myself for the scattered remains data because a lot of the articles, the researchers aren’t looking at criteria that I want to look at. And when you say police reports don’t collect certain data, I’ve encountered that too, where the police reports aren’t collecting certain data. And so that’s not published. And so all of this stuff, I’m running into issues where I would love to develop a predictive model with AI because that’s predictive. AI is great for looking at patterns. Really, really great. It surpasses the human brain.
But the data that you see, they’re not enough, or it’s not clean, or it’s somehow limited. So I feel your pain on that one. Yeah.
Lorna: And unfortunately, we just have to work with what we can work with and then build from there. Because I think maybe you understand this more than most, like you’re carving a space, right? You’re carving a space, you’re trying to help and improve, but that path has not been made for you. And so you’re setting the tone. And so when you do that, you have to make choices about what that setting the tone looks like for you. And so I’ve had conversations with researchers who want to enter in this space, listen, there’s a lot of opportunity for you here. It’s underdeveloped, and it’s not paid attention to enough. And so you could really go wild, but I would urge caution. And I would always urge researchers to put families, loved ones, and communities at the center of their work.
And so I agree, AI, the predictive quality for AI is phenomenal. It really does do more than we could even think about. It blows my mind sometimes. And I really support that. I think pattern work, case linkage, so freaking important. But if it moves beyond that, always engage families and loved ones in that conversation, engage people with lived and professional experience in it to see what would actually be useful. Because again, you can do so much here. There’s so few people doing this work. And that for one is great, you know, to give us opportunity to move our research and other agendas forward.
But always me, I always consider the population my work effects. And that’s most important. So I’m very careful, I guess, in my approaches, but I’m not necessarily seeing that by other people. And so I’m having conversations about what that means and how to make sure that we’re being kind of considerate of all kinds of different perspectives. Yeah.
Yvonne: Yeah. We can’t take the human out of researching humanity.
Lorna: Yeah.
Yvonne: We’ve got to keep it all together.
Lorna: Exactly that. And the reality is the work that you and I do, you’re dealing with people’s worst moments, worst life experiences, most vulnerable, experiences, sometimes the worst days of their lives, And, that’s a great perspective to have when it comes to what we do. you are examining death and I’m examining as much life as I can. And so, we’re on kind of the other sides of each other’s spectrum. I’m trying to stop it from being a death situation. and you’re trying to recover death situations. And so, all of what we do is so important for families and loved ones. But, that I think underlying this is maybe I’ll just say it more pointedly I think my concern is because of the swinging into the true crime genre and the sensationalization of harm and the commodification of trauma that we’re experiencing in the field.
And then the AI stuff when it comes to predicting, which cases should get police resources based on chances of resolution. I’m concerned I don’t want us to swing away from what’s important here. And what’s important is bringing people home. And if not bringing people and their remains home, at least closure and settling and information for families and loved ones. And I urge that we keep that perspective always at the forefront. And so I’m just paying attention to those things that are happening and trying my best to navigate them as they come up. I think my new book does a lot to try and tackle some of that issue with the true crime space, but I have this restlessness right now. Again, back to the earlier part of our conversation, I’m a builder and I’m seeing a problem starting with that slippage into sensationalism and commodification. And I want to challenge it or correct it. And I don’t quite know how to do that. I’m not on video. I like to be a little wallflower in the background and be a quiet player. But some of the things I’ve been thinking about is putting my face online and saying, “Hey you Tik Tockers, here’s the reality. Here’s what’s true. what you need to consider.” But obviously I’ve paused on that.
Point being though, I don’t want to be a Tik Tok influencer. I want to correct some of the narratives that are going on out there. I want to solve some of these problems and I just don’t quite know how to do that. You or any listeners, if you have recommendations for me to tackle this restlessness and tackle that problem, I would be very willing to hear it because I think we need to do it now while the momentum’s there. Because the reality is for missing persons, we know now more than ever about the problem and we know we have more attention now than ever because of that true crime genre on the missing person’s problem. And so how can we make sure we’re steering that in the way that it needs to be for lived experience and the loved ones experience, right?
Yvonne: Yeah, I don’t know, Lorna. That’s a tough question, especially the day that we’re living in right now where everything is about streaming and on-demand information and attention and that’s just the platform forget about the topics that are out there.
Lorna: Yep. Yeah. We’re in an attention economy, and your attention is feeding algorithms. It’s giving people money. And when did we slip into profiting off of pain? When did we do that? When people are educating on cases and trying to get information, there’s value in that. And there’s always positivity in more eyes on the case, the better. I just don’t know how to communicate that. There’s also a flip side to that the more eyes on the cases also means more speculation, more theory, more privacy breaches, more invasiveness. You’ve got parasocial relationships being developed. You’ve got people literally pointing to family members as the offenders when that’s not true, right? And so I’ve always said it’s two sides of the same coin. It’s a double-edged sword. So, how can we steer to the positive and negate or mitigate the negative as much as possible so that we can really leverage basically crowdsourcing for missing person’s investigations versus some of those really negative outcomes or side effects of that increased attention on the case.
Yvonne: Yeah, maybe there needs to be a Netflix documentary about that. I don’t know.
Lorna: Put me on stage maybe. Actually, maybe don’t. Who knows, but yeah, maybe. Maybe there needs to be a…
There’s a missing person’s unit in the US that did a show on Netflix. I can’t remember what it’s called but they approach it through that crimefighting perspective and it drives me mad because that’s not the reality, right? And it just feeds directly into sensationalism in this space. Most cases are not treated through that crime perspective and every single case in that missing person’s unit docuseries from the US, “we’re concerned”, “person’s dead”: it’s kind of that lending into that narrative. And that’s not how cases are treated. And so, again, there’s value in what they’re doing but how can we steer it towards the reality here, the lived reality, the professional reality of responding to missing persons.
Yvonne: All right. Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you want to bring to the forefront right now?
Lorna: I don’t even know. We’ve been chatting for over an hour now and I feel like I’m forgetting most of — I’m just kidding – I remember some things. I think to bring it into full circle, first, I’m accessible so if folks have questions comments suggestions, please reach out to me or take a look at the missing person’s research hub. If you can contribute, you’re very welcome to. Basically, you submit your own information and then we go from there. But if there’s opportunity, and you have comments or thoughts, reach out to me. I’m happy to hear them. As folks get interested in this field, if anyone listening is, keep families and loved ones and communities at the forefront of your work, if and when possible. That would be my two final comments.
Yvonne: Nice. Okay. Just so that everybody’s aware, the Missing Person Research Hub is missingpersonsresearchhub.com. So missingpersonsresearchhub is all one word, dot com.
And I believe you do have a contact form or something on the site.
Lorna: There is an email. You just click the button and it takes you right to the email function. It’s missingpersonsresearchhub at gmail dot com. And myself, I’m laura dot ferguson at uregina dot ca. But if you just Google me you’ll find all my information on there. I’m very findable which is maybe a good thing but also maybe a bad thing.
Yvonne: I know. Pros and cons of double-edged sword, all that sort of stuff.
Lorna: You bet. Yup.
Yvonne: All right. Fabulous. Lorna, thank you very much. This has been a steep learning curve for me, and I’m more than a little mind-blown. I think I’m going to go have to have a snooze now and digest all of this. It has been wonderful talking to you. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Lorna: Yeah. And thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Yvonne Kjorlien 