Writer Scenario - Small town police vs. metropolitan police

[Dragonspawns]

Hello! Forgive any errors - my first post. I'll try to keep it short and sweet.

I'm a writer and during a editorial review by my writer group, one of which is a former officer and PO, I was taken to task about a scene that I wrote. They suggested I get up to date info about it via this site.

Scenario:
Small town (think less than 10k total Pop.)
Church town, more people attend church regularly than not
Teen girl goes missing after a group date
Parents call around. One of the guys on the call list is a officer
He calls in and asks a favor of the Chief (?) to get movement on it now, rather than later
Chief approves 4 officers for search
Officer in charge allows neighbors and the parents to search the acreage behind the house after they confirm that she was seen unlocking her door by the kids dropping her off
Mother finds the teen while somewhat separated from the rest of the group
Officer in charge gets there after the Mother has gathered the body into her arms and is rocking it back and forth

What is the proper protocol here? I have the Officer acknowledging the loss of evidence but allowing the father to join the mother before the EMT's get to the body to confirm death. Then the EMT's take the body away. My justification is that it's a smaller town so they wouldn't be as hard-core on the rules - especially since the Mother already screwed up the scene before they got to it.

I would appreciate any help.

[Aidokea]

For starters, your question goes here:

https://forum.officer.com/forum/writers-block

[Aidokea]

I don't even know where to start with that hot mess.

Officers don't ask Chiefs for stuff to happen when there's a missing child, as some kind of "favor".

EMTs don't transport human remains.

Small town police don't necessarily follow the rules less, and big city agencies don't necessarily follow the rules more.

The whole thing reads like some lightweight Hallmark movie gone bad.

If you want to make it real, write about "missing" children that we find inside the house, or middle/high schoolers hanging themselves because somebody said something mean to them on social media- we get plenty of that [email protected]

[not.in.MY.town]

Hello! Forgive any errors - my first post. I'll try to keep it short and sweet.

I'm a writer and during a editorial review by my writer group, one of which is a former officer and PO, I was taken to task about a scene that I wrote. They suggested I get up to date info about it via this site.

Scenario:
Small town (think less than 10k total Pop.)
Church town, more people attend church regularly than not
Teen girl goes missing after a group date
Parents call around. One of the guys on the call list is a officer
He calls in and asks a favor of the Chief (?) to get movement on it now, rather than later
Chief approves 4 officers for search
Officer in charge allows neighbors and the parents to search the acreage behind the house after they confirm that she was seen unlocking her door by the kids dropping her off
Mother finds the teen while somewhat separated from the rest of the group
Officer in charge gets there after the Mother has gathered the body into her arms and is rocking it back and forth

What is the proper protocol here? I have the Officer acknowledging the loss of evidence but allowing the father to join the mother before the EMT's get to the body to confirm death. Then the EMT's take the body away. My justification is that it's a smaller town so they wouldn't be as hard-core on the rules - especially since the Mother already screwed up the scene before they got to it.

I would appreciate any help.

Let me ask you a practical question: Is all the police activity and organized search relevant to your story? If the mom is going to be the one to find the girl and compromise the crime scene, then you might as well just skip all the initial police involvement. Just have the mother call the girl's friends, have them tell her that they dropped her off...and then mom (or mom and dad) search the area behind the house and find the body. And THEN they call the police. That would eliminate the procedural mess, and the end result would be the same.