Missing persons
A missing person is a person who has disappeared and whose status as alive or dead cannot be confirmed as his or her location and fate are not known. Laws related to missing persons are often complex since, in many jurisdictions, relatives and third parties may not deal with a person's assets until their death is considered proven by law and a formal death certificate issued. The situation, uncertainties, and lack of closure or a funeral resulting when a person goes missing may be extremely painful with long-lasting effects on family and friends.
A person may go missing due to disaster, accident, crime, death in a location where they cannot be found (such as at sea), or many other reasons, including voluntary disappearance. In some countries, missing persons' photographs are posted on bulletin boards, milk cartons, postcards, and websites, to publicize their description.
We will set up a Facebook and Google+ page where you can set in your missing person add.
This page will be open for all to set in missing persons adds in, we will set up some ground rules so there will be no fake adds and so on but this will be posted on the pages.
We also know there is some people that is in hiding of there free will for different reasons and missing adds for this persons will not be accepted.
Persons that set in an add like that will be deleted and reported to the police. And if this will be a problem something I hope it not will be. Then we need to see if we just going to accept missing rapports issued from the police.
This 2 pages are open for everyone that have an account on either Facebook or Google+.
We have set them up on Facebook and Google+ for it will reach more people and for it’s accessible for more people and that is some of the point here.
We also hope that if you find the missing person alive or dead that you either delete your missing add or mark it whit found so people don’t search for someone that is already found.
This service will be free if there is someone this wonder about that.
Post the information
The most important part of the alert is to post the information about the missing person
- Where they were last seen
- Description
- Suspected direction of travel
- Who to contact if the person is seen
- Photo (if possible)
- The location is part of this important information, and believe it or not is often missed.
The most useful place to post the information is on a web site or blog. Twitter does not carry enough characters to contain relevant information, and Facebook is a closed system, and not easily indexed in case people need to search for the information.
Share Links I cannot stress this enough. Link to the definitive source.
This means if you are posting about a missing person on Facebook, Twitter or any other medium, include a link to the authority who posted the original alert. Definitive here means the lead agency, the one in charge of the investigation, and the one most likely to be informed as to the current state of the missing person.
People love to re-share these links. However, sometimes they are shared many days or even months after the event. Without a link it can be impossible to know if the person is still missing. If a link is going around about someone who is no longer missing, it detracts from a new missing person who we may need to alert on.
Another way to put this is that as the situation develops, sometimes more information comes to light. The original authority may have posted updates to their web site. In order to have access to the most up to date and accurate information, you need to read that web site.
Without a link to more information, sharing a photo or name of a missing person is futile.
