Police and Security, Vol. 16 No. 3-4, 2007.
Professional paper
Frequency of the Croatian mountain rescue service involvement in searching for missing persons
Marijan Šuperina
; Police Academy, Zagreb, Croatia
Krešimir Pogačić
; Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Croatia, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Safety is one of the fundamental needs and the condition for normal living and development of an individual and a whole community as well. Modern states realize the importance of organized and efficient system of searching, protection and rescuing, especially of lives and health of people and property. Police search training, especially the training related to missing persons, is considered to be based on case studies. Therefore, the impression is formed that it is exclusively based on experience. Our goal is to give scientific content to the police search training, to differentiate it from a pure retelling of certain successful or unsuccessful operations and their epilogues. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the relation/cooperation between the police and the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service in the course of police search procedures for missing persons. In this paper we have tried to show that the more frequent the stay in nature, the bigger the need for securing individual safety is, and that the circumstances and conditions are not always gentle for people. People could have influence on numerous threats and risks, but they fail to do it because of ignorance, inexperience, gullibility, etc. That is one of the numerous reasons why persons get lost in nature. Undertaking searches mobilize significant human and material resources, often for a longer period of time. Finally, we believe that we have managed to show the readers all those qualities, ways and procedures of knowledge and skills acquisition as well as the excellent competencies of the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service members in rescuing and searching for missing persons in mountains, on rock faces, in caves, in waters, unapproachable buildings or parts of such buildings, debris, in bad weather conditions and public emergencies. The Croatian Mountain Rescue Service is a specific civil organisation with the aim to be the leading national service for mountain rescue in the Republic of Croatia. In addition, the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service has as distinctive features universality and specialty, special exclusivity in rescuing people, elitism guaranteed by procedures and training, state-of-the-art equipment and keeping up with the latest technology, its availability and operativeness guaranteed by organized duty hours, and eventually territorial distribution (15 units of the Croatian Mountain Rescue Service), all of which make the Service unique.
Keywords
CMRS, Mountain Rescue Service, the disappearance of persons; search, security, extreme sports, mountain climbing, scuba diving
Hrčak ID:
79264
URI
Publication date:
15.2.2008.
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