i agree with you on one hand, Cindy, on the other its like this: yes, you only have so many trained people, but when you know that in the beginning you will have a huge volume and require a lot of personnel you should have that in place--that's logistics. it's like if you have an earthquake and are expecting a lot of injuries to flood the ER and need a lot of ambulances and medical equipment--in general you (the municipality) might not have such on hand to accomodate this kind of dilemma, but if you expect one eery so often, or its not that infrequent in your region or area of work, then you have to be ready to assemble. knowing you might have an extra 100 on payroll for three weeks, will need some tents to operate out of, etc....if you miss a single tip, that might be key, as we stated early in thread 1 or 2, that something very small can be the case breaker, and later LE posted a request for tips on anything out of the ordinary.
my saying the family should pay someone to do it (didnt really mean that the mom would be on the fone saying "oh, have you seen my Morgan?") is a way to stem the loss of tips from the lack of resources of the LE, as per the general appearance of the case's handling. it is true...if we can walk to the moon, but we can't find a person, it really is a matter of resources...not like you need helicopters flying around all day, but you need to get the tips at least. and if they are having trouble following up on tips, and are doing everything over the fone, without a voice analyzer, then you can bet some tips will be false, some maybe true, but will sound false to the human ear and they will discount them..
again, it gets messy when there arent enuff people to handle it: it's like getting slammed in a restaurant with 1000 customers all at once--if its ever happened before to your restaurant or your type of restaurant, then you should have an emergency action plan-unless you think 5 days is a reasonable amount of time to get water to people [FEMA]?