The old Missing Persons Unit was averaging 146 people a year that became long term missing. By last year that was down to 16 | ebooktim
Detective Chief Inspector Glen Browne is manager of the NSW Missing Persons Registry, part of State Crime Command. From the 1940s it was called the Missing Persons Unit but the name, and a whole lot more, changed in July 2019 because according to one coroner, there were “systemic deficiencies” in the way missing person investigations were conducted.
“The most important stat we use is average days missing and prior to the registry the average was 6.29 days and we got that down in 2021 to 2.8 days. We are finding people more quickly and finding them before they come to harm,” he said. The old system didn’t help the family of Ursula Barwick, 17, who disappeared in 1987 after boarding a train for Sydney from the Central Coast. Her family endured 29 years of torment before the police finally discovered she had died in a car crash three weeks after being reported missing. Her mother Cheree died not knowing the truth.
“If a child is 20 minutes late home from school it may well be that they have dropped off at a friend’s place but it might also mean, as has happened in the past, that they have been abducted and they are already gone. This is the difficulty we face all the time. Do you call out the cavalry? Do you call out the helicopters, the SES and the police dogs and the drones?
“I was learning from the research that when one person is reported missing at least 12 other people are directly affected, and that’s a conservative number,” she said. Gordana Kotevski, 16, missing November 24, 1994 last seen at Charlestown. A white 4WD was seen in the area at the time.