For decades, UK police forces have struggled to instil a suitable procedure for missing on a night out cases.
“One case in Manchester even saw the police telling the mother of a young man, ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s shacked up some nice young lady. He’ll be back in a couple of days,’” says Geoff Newiss, research associate at the University of Portsmouth.
“That’s quite something to say when in due course, you’re pulling a body out of the water.”
Newiss has been working to improve police knowledge on missing on a night out cases for the past ten years. Back in 2011, while working with Missing People, he noted a pattern for 17 fatal cases of men who never returned from a night out: all but one of the individuals were found in water. “In the missing persons world, that level of consistency stands out,” says Newiss.
This information later accounted for a chilling statistic: men who go missing on nights out are at a nine per cent risk of fatality, as opposed to the less than one per cent risk for all missing persons cases. For a trend that is so deadly, patterns such as bodies being found in water are essential in improving police response and minimising the death toll.
However, missing on a night out cases are not currently coded for in the databases for UK missing people. In fact, the phenomenon has only been acknowledged as a category in the past five years, with data on the topic being largely attributed to a 2017 report from Newiss, co-written alongside Dr Ian Greatbatch.
Using a combination of media reports and individual databases, Newiss recorded 96 cases in the UK of men who were reported missing after a night out between January 2010 and September 2015. From conducting further research beyond the initial report, Newiss concluded that approximately 85 per cent of individuals found after going missing on a night out were recovered from water.
As the nation’s largest city, London stands as one of the most prominent regions for missing on a night out cases in the UK. However, Newiss asserts that population is not the key factor for these incidents: “It’s about the geographical profile of the areas. You’ve got areas of high nighttime economy directly next to large waterways – places where people tend to find themselves walking along water to get home.”
Newiss claims that Bath, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, York, Shrewsbury and Manchester account for nearly 80 per cent of cases alongside London. Reports of sightings before such fatal incidents occurred were also not significantly greater in the capital: “If you’ve got someone missing in the West End, you are going to have a lot of security footage. But in Mortlake or Barnes, it’s no different from a small town anywhere else in the UK in terms of CCTV.”
The report hypothesises that those who were last spotted on CCTV further away from the venue of their night out were more likely to be found on land. The small sample size made the proposition inconclusive, albeit it was found that 90 per cent of individuals last seen under two kilometres from their last venue point were found in nearby waterways: “If you have footage of them leaving a nightclub in the middle of London, and then a sighting 100 metres away and that’s it – my inclination is to start close to that location and see where the danger points are.”
Consistency is a recurring theme throughout the report. It was found that 84 per cent of the original 96 cases were in some way intoxicated, with more suspected to be. Despite having a reputation for partying, students accounted for only one-third of all cases of those missing on a night out. Newiss partially attributes the older demographic in his study to workers overdoing their Christmas party celebrations: “When you have more than you’re accustomed to, your ability to look after yourself decreases quite markedly.”
The observation is fitting, as winter accounts for over half of all cases in the report. Shorter days and reduced visibility mean fewer opportunities for sightings, and therefore more accidents when compared to summer months: “There’s no visibility in the winter and you don’t have witnesses. Survivability in the water plummets. You can survive in rivers in July in this country for a while, and you have a decent chance of getting yourself out or calling attention. If you end up in the Thames in January, you’re in real trouble.”
Newiss maintains that the high prevalence of fatalities and desire to improve the handling of such cases were the rationale behind writing the report: “The pain of not knowing, of never having the body – fearing the worst but possibly hoping for the best. That’s the real reason that we did this research, we wanted to focus police minds.”
Looking towards the future, Newiss is still working for the categorising of these cases to become more prominent: “I would love to see missing persons information systems adopt a code to indicate someone went missing on a night out. To be able to identify a large sample of found alive and found dead cases would let us do a risk assessment properly.”
Overall, however, the report has been praised by police officers for informing their response to such cases, with missing on a night out arising as an independent category: “Police can now say, ‘We should be investing heavily into the idea that this person is in water’… I think it does focus the mind. That’s a far cry from what was happening 20 years ago, when a lot of police were saying ‘Who knows?’ for these cases.”