Search and Rescue Team (SAR) "Lisa Alert" was created by volunteers on October 15, 2010.
The detachment received its name in honor of the deceased girl Liza Fomkina, whom hundreds of volunteers searched for for ten days in September of the same year and was found dead.
The USAR team now receives an average of 30 to 100 missing persons reports every day.
Over the past year alone, about 25.3 thousand applications for search were received, more than 19 thousand people were found alive.
Liza Alert divisions operate in 59 regions of Russia, more than 25 thousand volunteers are looking for missing adults and children.
The chairman of the detachment, Grigory Sergeev, told why the first three days after the disappearance of a person are so important, what is the difference between the search for elderly people and children, and who the “serial runners” are.
"Resonance interferes"
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There is a feeling that
recently the loss of children and crimes against them have become
more frequent
.
Is this true
?
- Crimes against children, like missing children, do not depend on a specific year.
Perhaps the weather, seasonality, economic situation and some other factors affect, but in general, the number of disappeared every year is approximately the same.
Another thing is that, due to the increased attention of the press, it may begin to seem as if such cases have increased.
-
A
eople sensitive to such incidents.
Does this resonance help your work?
- The resonance does not help our work, rather it interferes: there are a lot of unnecessary people on the spot without proper preparation.
If you want to help the squadron, it is better to donate equipment that is used in search operations, from flashlights to special equipment.
Additional problems to search for in such high-profile stories arise from the interest of the media and the increased attention of emergency services.
For example, now we are looking for seven-year-old Savely Rogovtsev.
He disappeared in the Vladimir region on September 28 - he did not return from school.
And for several days we lined up work with the special services.
Finally, the regular change of heads of structures also complicates interaction with them.
© Search and rescue team "Lisa Alert"
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Did the volunteers have to intervene when people tried to arrange lynching on a suspect in crimes against people who are listed as missing
?
- Volunteers are not trying to stop attempts to arrange lynching.
There are too few people in our units for this.
And half of the city may come out with the desire to tear to pieces the alleged villain.
It's always hard to look at, and such cases certainly don't help the search.
One of the last such stories happened on a large, difficult search in Saratov for nine-year-old Lisa Kiseleva, where more than four thousand people passed through the headquarters in a day.
There, as you remember, unrest began, people went to seek justice to the police department, which, of course, did not contribute to the work of the police either.
"You need to search right away"
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Who is more difficult to look for - children or the elderly?
In what is the longest and most difficult quest you or your colleagues have had a chance to participate in?
- For example, recently they were looking for a person who disappeared in the Odintsovo district of the Moscow region - he left the boarding house.
He did this at the end of September: it is cold outside at night, and there is little information from witnesses or surveillance cameras.
But our guys did not stop, they continued to post orientations, interrogate people, and patrol the areas.
The search lasted almost ten days, in the end the man was found and returned to the boarding house.
The hardest thing is to find children.
More responsibility, fears, hopes, loads.
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Can you name sama
e
prevalence of
e
causes of missing persons?
- First, it's arrogance.
A person may no longer be in that age and shape to get out of the forest on his own.
© Search and rescue team "Lisa Alert"
The second reason for missing people is a lack of control.
When either the lost person himself did not say where he went, or close people do not control the person who needs it.
For example, we received a request for the disappearance of a very elderly person who is over 90 years old, disappeared more than four days ago, and we received the message only now.
Moreover, it is the first days that are critical for a successful search.
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Are there repeated searches for the same missing people?
- Yes, there are "talented" people who manage to get lost in the forest several times and remind when we find them: "Do you remember, you were looking for me last year?"
The situation is more complicated and serious with children who deliberately run away from home many times.
After all, there is no service behind our back that will take and fix the situation at home.
A child runs away from parents, from fear, from problems, from school, from illness.
And nobody is dealing with this issue.
There are "runners" that run away three times, five times, ten times.
They gradually become antisocial, they feel better on the street than at home.
This is a big problem of the state that must be solved.
"Work like a mechanism"
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Are there any friends and relatives of the missing or dead among the participants in the movement?
Does Lisa Alert keep in touch with the families of the rescued people?
“We have volunteer guys who made friends with the families of the people they were looking for, they still keep in touch.
But somehow this does not happen systematically: there is simply no time for it.
We have to work like a mechanism with a bunch of gears, whose task is to find a person.
There is no time for reflection.
Among the members of the detachment there are people who themselves faced the loss of relatives and friends.
However, they do not receive any unique status or unique tasks, they are the same volunteers as the rest.
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Did you manage to
establish contact with the Ministry of Internal Affairs?
- The police and any other structures may treat the volunteers with some distrust, which takes a long and difficult time to fix.
Although volunteers often have all the functionality that allows them to effectively search for people.
If this is not the style of "swan, crayfish and pike", but a real joining of efforts, then the results, of course, will be fundamentally different.
Speaking systematically, in Moscow we have a serious problem in relations with the police.
Often the police say in plain text that they have no time and do not need to distract them from their work.
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Are other volunteer groups in Russian cities associated with Liza Alert or do they exist autonomously?
- There are now more than a hundred different names of search units in Russia.
They have different efficiency, different search capabilities.
"Lisa Alert" is the largest of them, with a unified "how to search" system, with a unified learning grid, with unified requirements.
I hope that sooner or later all search engines will work the same way.
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Does the movement have a "memory board" about those who could not be found alive?
- We have not yet hung together portraits of everyone we could not find alive.
But I think that if we do this, we will be stunned by the scale.
Let me give you an example.
© Search and rescue team "Lisa Alert"
This year on May 25, the Day of the Lost Children, we pasted over the backs of the football stadium with orientations for children whom we were looking for in the ten years of our squad's existence.
As a result, almost half of the huge stadium, which has more than forty thousand seats, was filled with photographs.
We held the same action in Lyubertsy.
We glued the fence of an ordinary plant with orientations close to each other.
We needed more than 500 m of the fence in full height in order to place all these orientations.
When you see it yourself, it makes the strongest impression - you walk past this fence and understand that it does not end.
That's when you realize how serious the problem is.