Involving citizens in urgent missing person cases. An application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour within District Criminal Investigations Teams

ABSTRACT

This article examines the use of citizen participation by detectives in urgent missing person cases. Citizens can make a valuable contribution to finding a missing person, but this kind of assistance is often underutilised. We applied the Theory of Planned Behaviour to explore the extent to which attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control influence detectives’ intentions to involve citizens and the detectives’ considerations underlying such intentions. To this end, a quantitative questionnaire was developed and administered to detectives from four regional police units. The best goodness-of-fit of the theoretical model was found for officers who deal with urgent missing persons cases regularly, but not often; for this group, the model explained 39 percent of the variance observed. The results show that intention is significantly related to detectives’ attitudes. Subjective norms had a significant predictive value, except for officers who encounter missing persons cases frequently. Perceived behavioural control had no significant effect. The study suggests that the choice to involve citizens is mainly attitude-driven, and is determined primarily by detectives’ personal affinity with citizen participation and their perception of its benefits. Perceived risks, such as damage to the investigation, have limited influence on decisions regarding citizen participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Decision making
• police discretion
• citizen participation
• missing persons

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Because of registration, exact numbers are difficult to determine, nor is it entirely clear to what extent these are unique individuals or repeated disappearances.

2 Personal communication, Missing Person Specialist. This estimate is consistent with Phoenix and Francis' (2022) finding that in the United Kingdom, one in 10 missing persons was assessed as high risk by the police.

3 Operational staff

4 Personal communication from the organizer of the Ready2Help Rotterdam Police Unit

5 Personal communication from the organizer of the Ready2Help Rotterdam Police Unit

6 Within the TPB, there is no conceptual distinction between self-efficacy (Bandura 1977) and perceived behavioral control (Ajzen 2020).

7 The Dutch police organization is divided into 10 regional units and one central unit. The regional units are divided into several districts, and each district into several frontline teams, which are responsible for frontline policing at the community level. Criminal investigations are organized at the regional level (Regional Criminal Investigations Departments) and at the district level (District Criminal Investigations Teams).

8 For this test, the categories frontline team, Department for Frequently Occurring Crime and other were merged due to the required values per cell.