When 19-year-old Richard Okorogheye went missing, a Met Police call-handler told his family words to the effect of, “If you can't find your son, how do you expect us to?”.
In fact, his mother had been trying and this was well-documented. She was constantly calling the police, urging them to escalate the case and complaining that more needed to be done to locate her son. But by the time they decided to listen, it was too late. His body was found in a pond in Epping Forest nearly two weeks later.
The next year, the Met Police publicly apologised to Richard’s family. The deputy assistant commissioner at the time, Bas Javid, labelled the call-handler’s question as “insensitive” and said that officers “fell short” when responding to Richard’s disappearance. This arguably tepid response was swiftly rejected by his family, who accused them of racism.