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Is there anything more important than some blokes life?
Other people's lives?
If [i]nothing[/i] is more important then would you be happy for them to devote their entire staff and all their budget to it?
How happy would you be to find out that the investigation into a serious crime against a loved one has been put on hold to look for someone's mobile phone?
All on the slim possibility that if they find it, and if they can access it, then there [i]might[/i] possibly be some small clue on it that they couldn't get from phone records.
The fact that the police have done cell site on his phone suggests they have classified him as high risk, because we can't get those enquiries authorised otherwise.
It will be a resource-intensive investigation, led by a senior detective, and in terms of staffing, resource provision, tactics etc will be similar to a murder investigation. The fact that it is getting scrutinised by national media and his mother has criticised their response means it will also be deemed a critical incident
which means more hands-on scrutiny from more senior managers. One of those managers will have as part of their responsibility the press strategy. In a case I have familiarity with this went as far as taking independent expert advice on the gender, ethnicity and age of the police officer used to make the statements that would be most likely to generate a response from the target audience (which wasn't the general public).
The decision not to search a landfill will not have been taken lightly, and will not have been influenced by lack of staff or costs.
And just to add to all that, bizarrely the officers involved are normal people with their own families and loved ones, and might just have some empathy with his family and take some personal interest in trying to find someone's missing son...
>250,000 people go missing in the UK every year
+
Police dealing with biggest ever manpower and funding cuts .....
And just to add to all that, bizarrely the officers involved are normal people
That's a bit of a sweeping generalisation, I've got a mate who's a policeman and he's not what I'd call normal 😀
The decision not to search a landfill will not have been taken lightly, and will not have been influenced by lack of staff or costs.
What other factors are there?
Public disruption maybe? But that comes down to costs too surely (e.g. cost to council of sorting alternative landfill etc).
More surprising to me is that they supposedly haven't searched the empty properties opposite where he was last seen.......
What other factors are there?
that they might have other information that hasn't been released to the press that meant they could eliminate it. Thought that was implied in my earlier post.
250,000 people go missing in the UK every year+
I wonder how many remain missing out of that figure per year.
Is there anything more important than some blokes life?
He's either dead (most likely) or has deliberately vanished and is living somewhere not wanting to be found. He's not being held captive and kept alive (but incommunicado) waiting for someone to track him down, neither has he fallen down a crevasse and got stuck, slowly starving over several months (but not dead yet).
How about he went to sleep in a skip (he was fairly well drunk by the sounds of it) - the skip gets collected, during the drive to the tip he wakes up, attempts to get out of the skip whilst the lorry is driving - leaves the phone behind - falls out of the lorry and gets hit by a car or ends up in a ditch or something.
I took 1SQN out riding in Austria back in 2009 and was coincidentally mid-Regiment officer application, and used the riding as a tool to organise a really useful and interesting site visit at RAF Honington. As it happens I didn't get in due to a recurring injury, but I've taken an active interest in the reg since. It's a pretty tight corps too, and as he was in para-trained 2SQN he would have been at the sharp end of the regiment.
Several friends are also in the RAF and there really is a family ethos to the service.
My thoughts and heart go out to the gunner, and his family and friends.
I wonder how many [b]want to [/b] remain missing out of that figure per year
Further update here:
[url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-38483180 ]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-38483180[/url]
He is gonna be a daddy - I hope they find him soon 😥
4 months after the event, when that appeared to be a fairly obvious place to look?
Bizarre.
Maybe they listened too much to Chief Constable Gary M? Or they found some extra money down the back of the sofa?
Would have been much, much easier at the time of disappearance.
4 months after the event, when that appeared to be a fairly obvious place to look?
Evidence from the bin lorries weighing system suggested he's not there so it wasn't the obvious place to start.Also I wouldn't consider a 10 day job for a specialised search team to be a good use of resources earlier given that if he is in the landfill he's dead anyway. At the beginning surely its better to focus your resources on the places you might find him alive. Once you no longer think you'll find him alive then look in the places where he may be dead.
Let's say at the beginning there was a 90% chance he was dead in the landfill or a 10% chance he was elsewhere and possibly alive. Where would you start looking?
ok, fair enough (except the fact that delaying the landfill search makes it much more difficult 4 months down the line. Searching it the week after might only have been a 2 day job for 10 men).
So does the bin lorry weigh each pick-up it makes?
So does the bin lorry weigh each pick-up it makes?
I believe it is weighed as it leaves and then when it returns to the landfill site so the weight of rubbish is known each time it is emptied. It was apparently only carrying 15KG or so I belive that night which does on the face of it seem implausibly low but I believe it's systems were checked and found to be working. It doesn't of course rule out a one off fault.
If you want to give the impression that someone is somewhere they are not then putting their mobile in a bin is not a bad way of going about it. The police are always going to trace it's movements so should you wish to get rid of someone what better way to give the impression they have fallen asleep in a skip and are now dead in a landfill. Resources are all concentrated on looking in one place. Also a good way to give you time to disappear if it's your own doing.
It doesn't of course rule out a one off fault.
Or being deliberately tampered with by someone covering their tracks.
Maybe the weight was wrong ? Is it really normal for a rubbish truck to pick up just 15kg ? If that is the case the route and schedule needs looking at.
Quite why they did not search the such an obvious place almost immediately I just don't know. It's going to be much much more difficult now with an extra months worth of rubbish.
Quite why they did not search the such an obvious place almost immediately I just don't know.
Someone goes missing and the normal first reaction of people is to think "where" I imagine the first thing the police think is "why" I think that way of thinking is generally more likely in most cases to lead to better results.
And again the reason for not throwing resources at the obvious is firstly that it meant looking for a body not a living person and secondly it was a place made obvious by an action that might have been carried out by someone who had done him harm to divert attention.
So does the bin lorry weigh each pick-up it makes?
I believe it is weighed as it leaves and then when it returns to the landfill site so the weight of rubbish is known each time it is emptied. It was apparently only carrying 15KG or so I belive that night which does on the face of it seem implausibly low but I believe it's systems were checked and found to be working. It doesn't of course rule out a one off fault.
Just curious- if they are using a weighbridge, then it ignores a number of factors, correct?
I.e.-
How much fuel did the lorry use during the trip? How many people where in the lorry at the beginning vs. the end? Did the spare tyre (?) fall off? Did the washer fluid bottle split, or was lots of washer fluid used?
He probably weighed 70-80kg? So could be quite easy to compensate that weight with a variety of factors that would make the 15kg look incorrectly possible. Stranger things have happened..
So it's thought he climbed into a bin whilst drunk to get some sleep? Seems unlikely. Strange things happen on a night out I know but climbing into a bin?...
Looking at the area on googlymaps, maybe he got a lift from someone out of the area, hence not being seen on CCTV, but I guess the car would be picked up?
So sad for the family 🙁
A bin lorry at the centre of the investigation into missing RAF serviceman Corrie Mckeague was carrying a significantly heavier load than was first thought, police have said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-39200319
Imagine that, it wasn't actually carrying 11kg 🙄
I'd love to know in detail how they worked all this out.
It'll be something to do with the fella who was arrested recently, on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice I think.
"It'll be something to do with the fella who was arrested recently, on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice I think."
I've no doubt of that but if he got his paperwork wrong then how did they get back to the correct figure at this distance in time.
Ok I accept that I am an armchair expert: But given they knew he could not have got out on foot from where he was last seen, and they tracked his phone on the bin lorry route: This all points to him being in the lorry & the only evidence which contradicts this is the weight of the lorry load. Surely you'd want to be really, really certain that the weight of the lorry was checked and double checked. Someone has really messed this up big time.
Someone from plod is going to have a lot of explaining to do if they do find the lads remains in that landfill site.
Maybe they will never find him for that very reason.
@km 😐
Sadly of all the explanations this was always the most likely, bad weight info either from a faulty weighbridge or an idiot. [b]I wonder if the bin lorry contract with the landfill site is charged by weight ?[/b]
Maybe they will never find him for that very reason
No. The ones sifting through crap looking for him will not deliberately fail in order to protect the ones at the top. Proper cops minds don't work that way.
When the bin lorry story came to light as a reasonable possibility ... did they continue to let the landfill site be used in the area that the lorry dumped its stuff, or did they ask the site to leave that area, and move onto other areas of the site to fill in. (That way greatly narrowing your search area should you need to search it later ... as is the case now).
I wonder if the bin lorry contract with the landfill site is charged by weight ?
Most likely. Most sites I drove tipper lorries onto would weigh you in and out to calculate tonnage. Bin lorries at my local landfill site are weighed in and out as well.
that being said, if its a council site and council lorries, it may just be a case of recording how much rubbish is being put into the ground.
according to the beeb the answer is no, it was per deliveryI wonder if the bin lorry contract with the landfill site is charged by weight ?
At the time when all this was in the press I was surprised that a vehicle which is designed to collect multiple tonnes of junk, has no reason to be accurately calibrated, and is probably cleaned rarely would be able to measure its load to within a tenth of a percent.
At the time when all this was in the press I was surprised that a vehicle which is designed to collect multiple tonnes of junk, has no reason to be accurately calibrated, and is probably cleaned rarely would be able to measure its load to within a tenth of a percent.
...and yet clearly some people who knew thought it did and had total confidence in it.
...and yet in spite of that confidence there was a reason why it was still wrong, but the wrongness was able to be precisely identified months later.
Beyond me, and I can't wait to hear the full detail of exactly how the weight was assessed/reassessed, if it's ever released.
Well ... I never drove any tipper which had load guages, but i did get loaded by the front loading scoops at quarries and the like. If I asked for 20ton, then the operator would typically load up a scoop, hold it still and record the weight before putting it in. Then on the last scoop (typically the 3rd scoop) , they would adjust what was in the scoop by very very little amounts to get the total correct. The amount shoogled off the bucket could be as little as a few spade fulls. So for a single bucket load of about 7tons, shoogling off a few kgs must mean the scales are quite precise in their measurements.
That was 9 years ago, so based on that, in theory, no reason to suspect that the lorry couldn't be as accurate as is being reported.
^^ interesting. As above weighing in and out is the way to accurately guage what's been dumped.
Landfill tax is charged per tonne on top of normal landfill fees which can be by skip or lorry load. Not sure how it works if one is measured by weight and one by volume.
shoogling
Good word. Added to my vocabulary - thanks!