This month, drivers from the food delivery service Deliveroo will be displaying missing persons posters on their backpacks in the hopes that someone will have seen the people in question and ring the police with tips.

Searching for Dutch missing persons

Posters of five people who have been gone for a relatively long time will be displayed on Deliveroo driver backpacks in the cities Amsterdam, The Hague, Breda and Nijmegen. The missing persons themselves are from Breda, Leimuiden, Assendelft and Kampen.

Deliveroo and the Dutch police hope that this project (Ride to Find) will lead to some of these missing persons being found, or at least that someone will recognise the people in the photos. Deliveroo started this project at the end of last year in England. There, tips led to three of the missing persons being reunited with their families for Christmas.

Raising awareness

Each year in the Netherlands, between 16.000 and 20.000 people are declared missing. While the majority of these people are found within two days, 20 of them go missing for a long period and 15 are never found.

“Every bit of attention for missing persons helps”, says Neeltje Wagenaar from the National Bureau of Missing Persons. “Even if it is just comfort that the family can draw from the police search. The worst thing for those left behind is not knowing where their loved one is.”

The missing persons displayed on the posters are:

• James Patrick Grealis, aged 35, missing from Breda since October 23, 2008
• Bas Rossen, aged 63, missing from Breda since January 15, 2017
• Jeroen de Wit, aged 32, missing from Leimuiden since February 18, 2018
• Sidney Lute, aged 21, missing from Assendelft since November 2, 2016
• Dirk van den Belt, aged 82, missing from Kampen since April 8, 2018

Images: Deliveroo