From helper to enemy — the experience of cooperation with the police from the perspective of families of long-term missing persons

Abstract

The article aims to describe the quality of cooperation between police and missing persons’ lo-ved ones. This cooperation starts with the common goal of finding the missing person. As the con-text of the author’s research, the article discusses the already identified controversy concerning the quality of the formal search system for missing persons. The empirical material used for the article was comprised of data collected using a narrative interview method. The article presents only the perspective of missing persons’ families. The author revealed issues regarding the acceptance of a missing persons report. Three basic problems regarding the quality of cooperation between fami-lies of those missing, and police officers were also identified.