Search and Rescue Beer

Following on from yesterday’s post about the Sky Screamers’ fundraising effort, I came across another fundraising effort that deserved publicity.

Cambridgeshire Search and Rescue (CamSAR) are the nominated charity at this year’s Cambridge Beer Festival, which will also see the launch of a special beer – “Lost and Found”.

As you are all aware I’m sure SAR teams – of whichever variety, lowland, mountain, water – all tend to have one thing in common. That is their love of a small alcoholic beverage after a hard training session, or difficult incident. (Which makes CamSAR’s nomination so appropriate!) In fact, most teams will tell you about one or two “special” public houses that the team prefer; usually those close to the headquarters or training area.

So here’s an idea for a fundraiser … why not produce a SAR volunteer’s guide to great public houses around the country?

Selling ads would pay for the production; any books you sell would be pure profit.

Why not start the ball rolling by telling me about your team’s favourite pub!

May 11, 2011 · Robert Bradley · 2 Comments
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Berkshire Search and Rescue Parachute Team

I, like many of you, get easily bored by the large numbers of people who do parachute jumps for charity. I usually ignore such requests.

I love the way this fundraising effort, however, has been positioned and marketed.

The Sky Screamers: Berkshire Lowland Search and Rescue Freefall Team have set themselves up to, as many others do, jump out of a plane to raise funds for the Berkshire Search and Rescue Team -  SEBEV. I don’t know what impresses me most – the name, the thought of SAR parachutists or just the clever website and facebook page – but whatever it was, it deserved publicity!

So go visit their website, like their facebook page and maybe even give them a couple of quid.

http://www.skyscreamers.com/

May 10, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
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Will the police be downgrading missing person calls?

Following on from my posts on the effects of police cuts on missing person search and Geoff Newiss’s post on police cuts I felt the need to do more research. Sometimes I wish I didn’t bother…

Here is a quote from a Home Office Report from last year that I had missed until now …

Front line officers believe there is a need to apply a more proportionate and risk based approach to handling and recording missing person enquiries. An early assessment of why the report is being made and whether there is fear for the safety and/or welfare of the person will be important.

Dependent on the circumstance, it may not be proportionate or necessary to record full details of the missing person on the first call. Equally, circumstances might dictate it is necessary. The level of information/detail/investigation required and the most appropriate way of collating it needs to be continually reviewed. It is also important that where information has been taken previously it is reused rather than duplicated.

Having reviewed the ACPO definition of missing person, alongside those from other jurisdictions. I recommend that the ACPO definition is amended to include “fear for the safety and/or welfare of the person”

I have some quite serious concerns regarding this definition. Whilst I am very sure that the police’s role in missing person incidents should be reserved for those that are in danger and that “every day” missing persons – whilst obviously distressing for all involved – should be dealt with by different agencies, there is a very real possiblility that by “downgrading” the definition police officers may be tempted to think that missing persons are not “real” policing (even more than they do already!)

This would mean that potentially fatal and serious incidents, including abduction and murder as well as “our” everyday vulnerable mispers, could be ignored or sat upon until too late.

We have known for a long time that the police were moving away from their present risk averse management of incidents to a more measured approach. However, in order to do this police officers require the training and experience to be able to judge whether there is a risk to the misper. But where are they going to get this training from?

May 9, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
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BBC’s Missing Live starts again

You may have noticed the lack of a plug for the Missing People Blog post this week.

This was deliberately left till today to remind you all of the start of the BBC’s Missing Live program on Monday – Louise Minchin wrote the Missing People’s blog post about this.

I do have some concerns about television shows like Missing Live – good television comes from “out of the ordinary” stories and so risks trivialising the every day problem of missing persons and incidents. With that said they did a very good job of portraying the “emergency” side of missing person search in their piece on Sussex Search and Rescue.

They have also given us some useful training resources and studies – who will ever forget the helicopter observer repeating the classic “mispers with dementia walk in straight lines” and highlight some dangerous rationalisations “we thought we were looking for a body”.

However, the highlight for me, has been the unnamed ALSAR unit’s search technician’s training course slides with the memorable words – “reproduced without permission from the BBC” – Love it!

So enjoy the new series; I’m sure it will bring us more publicity and more things to talk about.

May 6, 2011 · Robert Bradley · No Comments
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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
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