Sarnia police have conducted 405 missing person investigations since January 1, 2022.
The figure was shared by Insp. Leo Murphy Thursday morning, while he provided the police services board with an overview of how they handle missing person investigations.
“We’ve had a dramatic increase in missing person occurrences with our police service,” said Murphy.
“The count is up from previous years, [representing] a 71 per cent increase over the previous year. This year we’ve had 50 missing person investigations and that’s up 16 from the previous year, at 41 per cent.”
Murphy said the majority of the reports involved youth.
“The 10 to 19 years of age [range] takes up a good majority of our calls; 120 males have been reported missing between the age of 10 and 19, and 64 females.”
Murphy said in most cases they’re able to locate the person within seven days.
“The smaller portion are those very serious investigations, where perhaps people are vulnerable, people are unaccounted for, or there may be some suspicious parts of the investigation.”
