How Far Do They Go?: A Spatial Examination of Missing Persons from Hospitals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Missing person cases are a global issue impacting policing. Among these, those who abscond from hospitals are especially concerning because these reports require collaboration across services, often strain already limited police and hospital resources, and present an elevated level of possible harm due to the high prevalence of mental illness, disability, and/or addiction. Despite this, to date, there has been a lack of scholarly attention on this phenomenon from a policing perspective. The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring how far missing hospital patients travel and where they are commonly found. Using a sample of 731 closed case files (2014-2018) from one police service, we identify spatial behaviour patterns specific to this group of missing persons. Results suggest that most do not leave the hospital grounds or stay within a 5-kilometer radius. Others were found close to the hospital and within city limits and returned of their own volition. By identifying these spatial behaviour patterns associated with missing hospital patients, police can refine probable search areas, allocate resources more efficiently, find the missing faster, and develop better-informed responses and policies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".