Response to missing persons reports - Greater Manchester Police and Staffordshire Police, August 2017

Two 15-year-old girls, one of whom was known to be at risk of child sexual exploitation, were reported missing to Staffordshire Police by the care home where they were living. The force conducted a missing person investigation, which involved several requests made to Greater Manchester Police (GMP) after information was provided suggesting the girls may be in that force area. Both girls were ultimately located five days after the missing report at an address within GMP force area, with an older man. One of the girls subsequently disclosed sexual contact had taken place between her and the man.

During the investigation, our investigators obtained statements from officers and staff from both forces involved in the incident. They also obtained and reviewed a range of documents, as well as emails and phone calls between the forces.

Our investigation identified that GMP did not conduct the enquiries requested by Staffordshire Police expeditiously. The most serious of these failures concerned a neglect to act quickly once a likely address where the girls may have been both present and at risk of sexual abuse had been identified via intelligence checks. As this information was sent to a generic GMP email address we were unable to identify the individual GMP officer(s) or GMP staff member(s) who first received it and failed to act diligently and expeditiously when receiving it. Had this individual, or these individuals, been identified then they would have been served with a misconduct notice.

We identified a number of learning areas for GMP around this investigation and recommended that GMP fully review the force’s actions to locate the missing vulnerable girls to further identify all learning.

We were of the opinion that the actions to find the missing girls would have been managed more efficiently had GMP taken overall ownership of the missing person enquiry as soon as the intelligence checks identifying a likely location where they could be, and at risk of sexual abuse, had been identified. We recommended that GMP examine and, if necessary, update relevant force policies in this area.

As the requests from Staffordshire Police were only ever treated by GMP as cross-force assistance requests, the GMP missing person policy was never implemented, meaning that the girls were never risk assessed in accordance with this policy. Specifically, we identified that GMP should have updated Staffordshire Police regularly in relation to their requests, instead of needing to be chased.

We believe that GMP should have created a high-priority force-wide incident number (FWIN) to visit the suspect man’s address after receiving it from their intelligence branch, and again when an email from Staffordshire Police containing similar information was received 14 hours later.

Our investigation has established that the GMP IT system did not have the capability for us to ascertain by whom and when these two very significant emails were opened, so could not identify individuals who failed to create the appropriate FWIN. We believe that GMP should consider whether it is feasible to update their IT system so that such capability would be available in future.

After reviewing our report and our recommendations, the force agreed. GMP advised that it will remind appropriate staff of their responsibilities around escalation and ownership regarding missing from home enquiries. The force accepted that not following the cross-border procedure resulted in a lack of ownership. GMP also advised that a new data service to be rolled out within the next 12 months will mean that it will be possible to find out who receives and opens emails.