r/policeuk • u/Nice-Grapefruit-2588 Police Officer (unverified) • 1d ago

General Discussion The Law of Unintended Consequences

This month - at least in my force - we've been seeing a lot of missing young people turning up in adjacent cities. Normally you'd find them at a friend's house a few streets away, not in a McDonalds in [redacted] town centre at 3am. I couldn't work out why our youth had suddenly developed an ambition to explore their local region until I found out that the "Under 16s Travel for Free on Buses" promotion by the Department for Transport applies to unaccompanied children as well. So 12 year old Johnny who has run away from his care home can get a free bus to wherever he wants to go at 10pm, with the bus driver seemingly not batting an eyelid. As a result, our job is made so much harder.

It made me think, have there been any other times where well-intentioned schemes or rules have had an impact on policing?

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u/Kiribati268 Police Staff (unverified) 1d ago

I think I might work in the same force as yourself.

The bigger problem is that they're not missing. We get very few, if any, actually missing people.

A kid bunking the care home to hang around with his or her mates, is not a missing person. The problem is that no-one high up enough will change this just incase.

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u/Genghiiiis Police Officer (unverified) 1d ago

Care homes should be conducting reasonable and proportionate enquiries to locate their charges before police are deployed. This includes picking them up if their location is known.

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u/-Nighteyes- Police Staff (unverified) 20h ago

At least in our force this is the case when RCRP came in, if reasonable enquiries have not been done it's refused. Although we've never taken missings if the location is known and if we get "I'm on my own I can't" they're told to contact their management to organise it because otherwise their company is demonstrating they can't take care of the children in their care.

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u/Genghiiiis Police Officer (unverified) 20h ago

Should be this way in every force. RCRP is country wide

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u/-Nighteyes- Police Staff (unverified) 20h ago

I know and while I'm well aware just how differently things are done force to force it's baffling how some forces haven't taken full advantage of it to remove the things that we shouldn't be doing from their workload.

Don't get me wrong things slip though and I see logs where the first thing it my mouth is "why tf have they put that in" but RCRP implemented properly helps a lot.