Matthew Wolfe

MATTHEW WOLFE, New York University, New York, New York, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Triaging the Lost: Care, Austerity, and The State Response to Missing Persons.” The grantee conducted embedded ethnographic field work within the Los Angeles Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit, in which detectives were observed as they responded to hundreds of missing persons reports. In the United States, over 500,000 persons are reported missing each year, a volume of absences frequently overburdening local law enforcement agencies. Yet, little was known about how detectives interpreted, classified, and triaged the absences, particularly through how perceptions of danger and value were constructed around absences and which disappearances were considered most worthy of an institution’s limited resources — which persons were missing and which were, from the institution’s perspective, truly missed. This field work was the first instance in which a social scientist was allowed to witness these processes. In the LAPD, the detectives observed were guided by a logic of “negotiated deviance” in which the label of “missing” placed upon absentees was continually contested, the product of petitioning and discourse from multiple actors, including families of the missing, the media, and officials within the LAPD itself. Unable to provide sufficient resources to investigate all absences, unit detectives were forced to ration care only to those absent individuals deemed, through this rhetorical contestation, uniquely vulnerable.