DADvocate

Several other's have already blogged on this incident where Tanya Rider languished in her wrecked car for eight days while the police did nothing and then suspected her husband had killed her. (When you put your son's football above blogging, many times you're Johnny come lately.) In hearing and reading the accounts, it seems the police were not reacting to the situation as much as they were reacting to it being a man whose spouse was missing.

Consider these two sentences written by Heather Nauert in an article at FoxNews "(Yes, they correctly feared that her husband might have hurt her. That is so often the case with missing women.) So police likely did the right thing by giving him a polygraph test, but why not "ping" her mobile phone, too?" Even the proverbial "right-wing" FoxNews considers suspecting the husband of harm, devoid of evidence, is the correct thing. The bias is deeply embedded in our culture.

Watch the husband's reaction here. He makes the point that once the police made it a criminal investigation against him, they found Tanya within an hour.

Police excuse their behavior as a matter of policy.

"It's not that we didn't take him seriously," Chinnick said. "We don't take every missing person report on adults. ... If we did, we'd be doing nothing but going after missing person reports."

Adults are entitled to privacy if they decide to do something out of the ordinary, and Chinnick said Rider's initial missing person report did not contain either of the two elements that would trigger an immediate search: evidence of foul play or unusual vulnerability such as age, mental condition or lack of critical medications.

According to this policy, you can be kidnapped, raped, murdered, etc. and the police will take no action unless they have hard "evidence of foul play" or "unusual vulnerability such as age, mental condition or lack of critical medications." If that is truly the policy, it is a horrible one. I suspect they took a look at Tom Rider with his beard, scruffy look and ball cap and decided "who wouldn't want to leave him" or "he's pulled a Scott Peterson."

Does it take a woman nearly dying for people to realize bias against men is bad?