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

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.