State of São Paulo Implements Advanced Techniques for Searching for Missing Persons
The disappearance of people in Brazil is more common than you might think. Around 80,000 new cases of missing persons per year are registered in the country, according to the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship. In this scenario, the Civil Police of the State of São Paulo released a new technique to contribute to the search for these people, which simulates the images of victims today, taking into account family characteristics and possible situations in which these people find themselves.
The disappearance of people is a serious problem, which suffers from the lack of a national database. When talking about children, for example, since 2017 the State of São Paulo has recorded 964 open complaints of children aged 0 to 11 who are missing. This year alone, there were 53 registrations.
Police clerk and forensic artist Thiago Beleza described that a technique developed by the Civil Police of the State of São Paulo is used by artists from the laboratory of the Department of Homicide and Personal Protection (DHPP) and involves the use of Adobe Photoshop, which is a photo editor. According to him, the process consists of analyzing the missing person’s face based on photographs taken by the family, from photos of the missing person himself to images of close relatives to create a visual representation of the person’s aging. “In other words, the age schedule is nothing more than a visual representation of the current age that a person would be”, explains the clerk. A visual simulation.
Furthermore, according to him, to request a search using this tool, the family would have to go to the police station where they registered the disappearance and ask the delegate who is in charge of the investigation to make the request to the Department’s Forensic Art Laboratory. State of Homicide and Personal Protection.
The family is also responsible for forwarding the photos that will contribute to the investigation and also providing a history of the missing person, for example, whether he was a drug user who could be homeless. “This drastically changes the progression of age, so any information that can be provided regarding this missing person is very important for the search work”, he notes.
Absence of data
In 2019, the federal government sanctioned a law that established the National Policy for the Search for Missing Persons and created the National Registry of Missing Persons. However, this database has not yet been consolidated.
For Criminal Law professor Daniel Pacheco Pontes, from the Ribeirão Preto Law School (FDRP) at USP, the lack of investment is one of the challenges in the search for missing people. According to him, the police are overwhelmed with a series of incidents and end up not being efficient enough to carry out investigations in a timely manner. “The more time passes, the worse it gets and it becomes more difficult to find the person who disappeared”, declares the professor.
The São Paulo Civil Police chief, Marcelo Mello Garcia de Lima, also cites the lack of integration between different bodies – Public Security, Health, Social Assistance – as a major difficulty in the search for missing people. “It is necessary for everyone to be together and involved so that the disappearance investigation is more successful. In addition to these bodies that I have already mentioned, it is important that the family and civil society collaborate”, points out the delegate.
Advancement in the system
In August of this year, the Public Security Secretariat of the State of São Paulo (SSP) released an unprecedented system to search for missing people in the State, the Information and Prevention System for Disappearance of People. According to information published on the São Paulo government portal, the platform will centralize searches in a single database that can be accessed by everyone, promoting the automatic sharing and dissemination of crucial information.
This innovation also brings improvements to the system, with the incorporation of 17 specific techniques to identify missing people through the CPF, adding other essential information, such as parents’ names, addresses, among others, to form a single and comprehensive database.
In addition to information on missing people, the platform will make available the numbers and results of police inquiries and other investigative procedures, as well as data relating to criminal proceedings initiated within the scope of the Judiciary. A database will also be enriched with news about the finding of missing people, death records and other movements or police approaches relevant to their location.
According to the information, the tool, which already has data gathered by the Civil Police through records of missing person reports, is being expanded. However, SSP has not yet announced when the platform will be completed.