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| Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay |
My news feeds have been bringing me so many reports of
missing persons in BC recently that I finally went looking for stats this month to clarify what was going
on. Was there actually more people going missing, or was I merely trapped in a
bad Google algorithm?
The truth turned out to be astonishing. Not only has BC been
leading by a long shot the missing-person stats in Canada for adults age 18 and
up every year since 2015, when the Missing Persons Act took effect, but the number of adults reported missing in BC has grown by more than 48 per cent since
then. (Our population has increased by 10.2 per cent in the same period.)
In 2022, BC police filed 14,751 missing-person reports involving adults to the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC). The province with the
next-highest number of reports was Ontario, at 7,298. While various provinces
have been No. 2 over the years—all with roughly the same notable gulf between
BC’s numbers and theirs—BC has always come in at No. 1.
Looking at per-capita rates, BC has been a consistent leader
there, too. In 2022, British Columbia had the highest number of missing-adult
reports per capita, with 273 reports per 100,000 people. The next highest was
Saskatchewan, with 146 reports per 100,000 people.
In fact, 42 per cent of Canada’s 33,913 adult missing-person
reports in 2022 originated in BC. That number is on the rise as well, up two
per cent since 2020.
Equally worrying is the growing number of adults who aren’t
being found quickly, in BC and across the country.
In past years, 60 per cent of CPIC reports on missing Canadian
adults were taken out of the system within 24 hours, and 90 per cent were
removed within a week. But in 2022, for the first time since stats have been
kept, those numbers dropped to 34 per cent removed within 24 hours, and 73 per
cent within a week.
I mentioned some of the startling BC-specific stats to an
acquaintance with decades of experience in high-level provincial government
positions. He said any dramatic gap
between the provinces for virtually any stat almost always comes down to some
reporting difference. “Nothing is ever that different from one province to
another,” he said.
So I looked into that.
The stats are based on missing-persons reports filed by
Canadian police departments into the CPIC database. Missing-person reports can be filed immediately (forget all those cop shows you’ve seen where people are
always having to wait 24 or 48 hours before reporting a missing person), and
you could certainly speculate that different departments or regions could have
different cultural practices around how quickly they file a report to CPIC.
Perhaps there’s a Robert Pickton effect, too. BC police
departments looked bad when the details came out about the 1990s-era serial
killer, what with so many of his victims missing for years but ignored by
police because they were survival sex workers living in poverty and addiction.
Maybe BC police ended up being more devoted than most to filing missing-person
reports from that point on.
So I tracked down media relations at the RCMP’s national
communications headquarters, the spokespeople for missing-persons information,
and asked them if they could help me understand why BC seemed to have so many
more missing persons.
They noted “many caveats,” from not assuming that the stats
are actually complete (many cases are resolved before they get to CPIC), to
being very cautious when considering the 11 categories of probable cause that
missing-persons cases are slotted into at the time of reporting.
“You cannot be assured that every single person categorized
in each category indeed belongs there,” wrote RCMP media relations rep Robin
Percival in her email to me.
They agree that the stats are almost certainly affected by
“differences in reporting procedures, as well as geography, urban/rural mix,
demographics, culture mix and other factors.”
But taking all that into account, I still see no way to
explain away BC’s huge lead on the number of adult missing persons as just
being about reporting differences. We just seem to have a whole lot more people
who go missing.
“BC has its own peculiar mix of factors, including an ocean,” wrote Percival, adding that many fishermen go missing. “It is also an area where people
drift to and then go missing.”
On the upside, our rate of missing children seems much more
in line with the rest of the country, though we’re still consistently among the
top three. In 2022, we placed second behind Ontario with more than 5,500
children missing, after Manitoba managed to bring down some high missing-child
numbers from years past and fell into third spot. Per capita, Saskatchewan and
Manitoba have the highest rates.
Nationally, 33,394 children under age 18 went missing in
2022. Three-quarters of them were deemed “runaways,” and more than half were
female.
Among Indigenous children, the percentage of missing girls
is even higher. Girls account for two-thirds of the 8,300 Indigenous children
reported missing last year.
Things that make you go “Hmmm…” Whatever the reason for BC
to be lapping the pack when it comes to missing adults, it doesn’t feel good.
Hope somebody other than a random blogger like me is taking a look at these
numbers.
***
But also...I happened to be in my Google News settings recently for other reasons, and discovered that Google had singled me out for having a big interest in "missing persons" and had been sending all the stories of missing people everywhere to my news feed. So while it did turn out to be true that more people are going missing, I was also getting a tailored feed that was bringing this to my attention by feeding me way more sad news stories than a person could possibly handle on people gone missing.
