What? I don't think I'd read this before. I'd be beside myself if my 11-year old was missing and I had to wait on LE for 3 hours to take my report.
Gannon Stauch: Arrest documents outline where and when missing 11-year-old boy was killed
Deputies with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office arrived at the house about 10:10 p.m., about
three hours after Stauch called 911 to report her son missing, and found her car backed into the garage.
Yes, of course you would be (beside yourself). But that's what it's like to have a child go missing. Seattle is not known for its rapid responses, btw (nor is Los Angeles - and San Francisco is even worse). 2000 people go missing daily. I suppose we could enact laws where kids get priority but in reality, kids are more likely to just turn up later.
I don't know anything about public satisfaction with CS police, but it seems to me that they took the call, had few details (so no reason for an immediate investigation - no word of a parent abduction, no sign of B & E, just a normal kid wandering away from home), and then they put it into NAMUS and other databases, and then sent the first
available officer to take a report.
Where I live, it's not uncommon for it to be 6-18 hours before the officer shows up for a report of this kind. The first line of investigation for a missing child is for the family to look for the child - and in 98-99% of cases that's effective and the child is fine.
The other crimes going down in CoS at the time made me really aware - there were other missing kids (older kids are more likely to be vulnerable to sex trafficking, not Gannon's age), they had to triage too.
Just as an example, one day at work, we had about 5 crimes/situations going down at the same time. I thought the one I reported needed way faster intervention (someone in a raised pick-up, speeding, hit a man in a wheelchair). But then, there was a sexual assault with the perp on foot running through campus, and a deliberate hit and run with an injury, and a physical altercation between two students (that was managed by faculty).
Just another day.
When we had 3 (THREE) break-ins over a period of 2 months, police did nothing. We had footprints and, eventually, video footage (but the timestamp was wrong - so, absolutely nothing was done). We know who it was. It was very very hard to avoid trying to do something about it ourselves. We learned that two other neighbors had had the same person break in to their home (to steal identity, btw). Then we had other neighbors (friends of the criminals) tell us to simmer down and stop reporting it.
Until you're a victim, you don't realize just how thin police services are - in every nation, in every state. It's actually way better, crime-wise, where I live than in many places in the US.
I think LE reacted pretty "normally" to the report of Gannon's disappearance and probably thought if he wasn't home by bedtime, it was a bit more serious...
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