What is a "search party"?
Law enforcement has huge responsibilities when a child is missing. They have to investigate numerous things. They start with the family, they have to eliminate family members so they can then focus their resource on friends of the family or peripheral contacts of the family or registered sex offenders within your community or then, ultimately, a stranger kind of scenario. Most law enforcement agencies are overtaxed and understaffed. And under funded. Therefore, one of the things that volunteers can do, and this is huge, is eliminate geography by searching for the child. But that has to be done in a very organized and in a very professional way. When I say that, what I mean is you have to use maps, you have to use grid searches, you have to do it in a way that you're searching certain areas but you're not necessarily tipping your hand as to where you're searching because everybody is someplace. So what we know is that when children are kidnapped, such as my daughter was kidnapped, and this is kind of unbelievable, that you have a big world there that you have to look through, but there's not a kidnapper in America that has ever taken a child more than a hundred yards in from a road. So, you have to be able to then search that road, on both sides, in for a hundred yards, but you don't have to search the entire mountain behind the road because you know that the child's not going to be there. Well I know that, and now you know that, but the vast majority of parents that find themselves in this difficult situation don't know that, which is probably why they're not the best people to lead the search, but they're certainly the best people to find somebody to lead the search and to encourage friends, family and volunteers to get involved in that kind of an effort.
