Wow. I am guessing they are understaffed and overwhelmed?
What about reporting something where there is a virus shutting down the nation?
I would have thought they would have arrived at Gannons home within half an hour.
Really? Well, I'm used to California. I live in a county between LA and SF.
I watched someone get beaten into unconsciousness in SF - the police never did arrive. The motel owner did nothing. We called an ambulance, which took almost an hour to arrive. I spent a couple of months trying to find out why, from SFPD, and got some interesting interviews. I was told to report it on an online page so that it could be part of their crime stats.
There was no virus shutting down the nation in January - but the response today would be a bit quicker (because, well, the local crime rate where I live is way lower than usual).
If you go back to the first couple of threads for Gannon's case, you'll see that other kids went missing that same week. Missing persons is not a top level emergency. Someone going in and shooting up a public place is a top level emergency.
I would be surprised if LE arrived within 30 minutes for a "runaway, voluntarily missing" person case anywhere - but perhaps you live someplace where there are lots of police. We can barely afford the police we have, where I live.
The number of kids who don't come home when they're supposed to (where I live) is up to 50 per day - so there's no way that our 12-20 patrolling officers can get to all of those in 30 minutes (weekends are worse).
How many responding officers do you have? My city is about 150,000.
I stopped listening to the local scanner, but by 9-10 pm each night, there are multiple calls for officers to respond to various altercations, fights, thefts, etc. All of those involve immediate violence. A missing person is just not coded as being as important. Officers no longer go solo - two or three cars are always called out. Just the park near my house will have 3-4 calls per hour. Nextdoor stats report an upswing in suspicious person complaints (although really, there's a downturn in street crime - domestic violence is much higher).
If a small child goes missing, I think maybe the response would be faster, but for an 11 year old, not so sure.
Have you ever called the police for a domestic violence complaint? It's a really unpredictable response time, but I'd say 20-30 minutes where I live (and then, the main officer is usually around for 1-2 hours, depending on what happened).