Detection vs Recognition – The Story

I wanted to share with you a story I was told when I first started in Lowland SAR (quite a while back now…) – Apologies to all those who have heard it before.

An elderly gentleman went missing from his cottage one winter’s day.

On discovering their father missing the family reported his disappearance to the local police. The local police sent out two officers to take the details and to have an initial look. At the cottage, after taking down the description and details of the man’s disappearance, the police officers did what all police officers do in these cases. They completed an initial search of the home address and local area.

So they searched the house thoroughly, went out and searched the garden thoroughly. Whilst they were in the garden they noticed a stream running alongside the house that lead into the countryside. The police officers decided to walk along the stream bank nearest to the cottage and search the area immediately to the rear of the cottage. They followed the stream for several hundred metres before they came to a fork in the stream where a large grey boulder sat.

They decided to carry on searching on their current side of the stream. When they did not find anything they reported back their findings. Their notes documented this search, including the search of the nearside bank of the stream up to the fork in the stream with the boulder and on.

The local Mountain Rescue team were called in to assist. Having been briefed about the initial search completed by the local police officers they decided to start their search on the far bank of the stream. They searched the area on this side of the stream up to the fork in the stream with the boulder. They continued to search the far side bank and surrounding area. They found no sign of the missing gentleman and reported back on the completion of their area how they had searched their area, noting the distinctive landmark boulder and fork in the stream.

Meanwhile the police’s aerial support team had been searching the area between the two diverted paths of the stream with the helicopter. They too, used the fork in the stream and the grey boulder as a landmark to reference their search. Unfortunately no sign was found of the missing gentleman and the search was suspended. (A search is only ever suspended if no sign is found. No search or missing person enquiry is closed until such time as the misper is found!)

The family, meanwhile, continued to try to find their father. In their desperation they even sought a psychic’s help. The psychic was convinced that their father would be found near some water … as they often seem to do. The missing man’s son, therefore, took another look along the stream. He walked up along the nearside bank and searched the whole area on this side. Still finding nothing he walked back to the boulder near the fork in the stream to cross the stream here.

As he stepped onto the boulder the boulder sank. He had found the body of his father. When a body floats up in water, it often hunches up; leaving visible only the back of the shoulders. That and the missing man’s grey jacket had meant that it gave his body the appearance of a grey boulder in the stream.

Why am I going on about this story, especially considering that I don’t even know if it is real? Because it clearly illustrates the difference between detection and recognition.

Detection can be defined as becoming aware of an object during a search; you see it, hear it, touch it or smell it.

Recognition, however, is recognising that the object you have detected is meaningful to the search effort.

Every search resource during the story detected the “grey boulder”. None of them, however, recognised that the object they had detected was significant to the search; or indeed, the missing person that they were searching for.

It is because of this that we are able to say that detection without recognition is useless!

There is a small postscript to this story that I like to add these days. After using this story in my teaching of basic search techniques for several years after first hearing it I was out on an actual search one evening. I was team leader with three search team members, all of whom I had trained. As we were walking to our search area I looked over into another search area assigned to a colleague.

There, in a small fishing lake some 400 metres away, I saw what looked like a blue boulder! On pointing it out to our team they all immediately saw the potential significance and we decided to have a closer look. It was only when I stood close to the boulder, however, that I could actually recognise it as a body and indeed that of our misper. The story we had all heard had helped us to find this unfortunate individual quickly and bring some form of closure to the family.

One day we’ll get a video camera set up and then you can all have the pleasure of hearing the story, as I first did, so long ago…

May 5, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
Tags: , ,  · Posted in: Search Thoughts, Search Training

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