How Aging Populations Are Transforming Police Work Across Asia

About one-third of East Asia’s population is projected to be 60 or older by 2050, making it the world’s fastest-aging region. Public debates about population aging have largely centered on its effects on democratic governance, economic growth, pension sustainability, healthcare, urban planning, and housing policy. Yet one area remains notably underdiscussed: policing. 

Across graying societies, police are becoming the “catch-all” agency for managing aging as their roles and workloads have expanded in unprecedented ways. Police officers frequently mobilize to search for missing seniors and answer late-night calls from those who are confused or disoriented. As AI-powered scams become increasingly common, officers are playing a growing role as educators and protectors, helping older adults recognize and avoid financial fraud. They are often the first on the scene when older adults experience falls, heart attacks, strokes, or other medical emergencies. They are also on the front lines of social service delivery, responding to mounting cases of elder abuse or neglect and routinely conducting welfare checks as social isolation and kinship erosion damage mental health. Furthermore, increasing traffic incidents involving elderly drivers have prompted the police to engage in driver safety campaigns and to identify and report at-risk older drivers. 

Beneath this expanding portfolio of aging-related police work lies a revolution in policing and governance more broadly. Silver policing in East Asia is fostering greater intersectoral coordination and shifting the role of the police to that of a facilitator within a broader network. This reflects mounting pressure in East Asian governance to decentralize solutions and incorporate more horizontal partnerships among diverse actors, moving away from historically favored top-down solutions to pressing policy challenges.  

Dementia-related wandering brings this emerging reality into sharper focus. With 57 million people living with dementia worldwide and the total expected to nearly triple to 152 million by 2050, responding to wandering has emerged as a critical policing function. The lion’s share of the world’s dementia patients reside in the Asia-Pacific region, with some studies predicting that nearly half of all dementia patients will live there by mid-century. Studies show that between 27 percent and 70 percent of community-dwelling people with dementia go missing, and significant police resources are allocated to search and rescue. Wandering can be fatal, and search efforts are time-sensitive; in some studies, up to half of people with dementia who go missing and are not found within 24 hours end up seriously injured or dead. 

The surging demands on the police require establishing new partnerships rather than fine-tuning traditional, centralized, hierarchical organizational structures and procedures. Police must now work rapidly and closely with hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities to determine whether a missing person has been admitted or located. Neighborhood associations, resident groups, and trained volunteers support search efforts, while families and caregivers strengthen prevention by registering older adults with dementia in local alert systems and equipping them with GPS tracking devices. Transit operators, retailers, and other businesses also serve as important community partners by staying alert for wandering older adults and reporting potential sightings. 

As coordination among police and other societal actors has intensified, countries have adapted and leveraged their existing infrastructure to scale these emerging collaborative solutions. Rather than building entirely new systems, each country has repurposed its existing strengths – such as transportation networks, urban planning, education systems, digital infrastructure, surveillance technologies, or biometric identification platforms – as the backbone for cross-sector collaboration that enables police to extend their capacity. Thus, a common thread across East Asia is not institutional convergence but infrastructural adaptation.

Singapore, for example, addresses dementia-related wandering by capitalizing on its world-leading urban infrastructure to expand police search capacity. It has over 800 “Dementia Go-To Points” located in public transit stations, supermarkets, and eldercare centers, where community members can bring seemingly lost persons for assistance from trained staff. Many older adults carry QR codes that link to their caretakers’ contact information, helping transform the city into a dementia-supportive network that extends the reach of the police.

Japan mobilizes its educational infrastructure to strengthen its community guardianship model – built around neighborhood police stations (koban), social workers, businesses, volunteers, and residents who assist in searches for dementia wanderers through their “SOS networks.” Thousands of these networks are found throughout the country, from megacities such as Tokyo to smaller cities like Omuta, and require high public awareness. Accordingly, children are taught in schools and through community-based education about dementia and how to respond to wandering seniors, forming a plexus of intergenerational support within the local community. The entire community serves as a safety net to prevent older adults with dementia from going missing or being seriously hurt, and an educated community becomes a standing alert and active care system that the police can mobilize. 

The Hong Kong Police Force, in contrast, takes advantage of the city’s extensive transportation infrastructure to create a large-scale, coordinated observation and interception system for locating missing older adults. Unlike in automobile-dependent societies, wandering older adults in Hong Kong are likely to use the city’s extensive Mass Transit Railway (MTR), one of the world’s busiest and most heavily used, operating more than 7,500 rail services and carrying over 4.7 million riders daily. In an unprecedented partnership with MTR, the police can enter the missing older adult’s identity-linked transit card number (called the Octopus, which is possessed by 98 percent of the working-age population) into the MTR system so that its use automatically alerts station staff and notifies the police of the individual’s location, while preventing the card from functioning at exit gates and directing the person to station staff for assistance.

China leverages its extensive surveillance infrastructure alongside an auxiliary online crowdsourcing platform to scale coordination. The police rely on integrated command platforms that enable them and other municipal agencies to access and coordinate information from CCTV networks. Over 700 million cameras in China are estimated to be in operation, roughly one camera for every two people. Moreover, ubiquitous drones help pinpoint a person’s location to aid the on-the-ground search. China also mobilizes millions of smartphone users through crowdsourcing apps such as Douyin Xunren (a public-interest missing-person service), creating a hybrid search architecture that combines state coordination with citizen participation to support police efforts. 

South Korea and Taiwan have integrated police work with tracking and identification infrastructure to collectively prevent wandering in the first place. The South Korean police, health agencies, and local governments have distributed GPS devices directly to people with dementia, at dementia safety centers, and through biometric identification of registered dementia patients. Families pre-register dementia patients’ guardians’ contact information, fingerprints, and photos in a centralized police database, enabling faster identification and reunification if the person is later found disoriented. Similarly, in Taiwan, biometric pre-registration, especially fingerprinting, combined with ID bracelets and other tracking devices (in some cities, a low-power Bluetooth positioning device that looks like a lucky charm from local temples is given to the elderly to increase adoption), enables rapid identification and reunification. 

As the harbinger of silver policing, East Asia offers a glimpse into the future of other countries. By 2030, one in six people worldwide will be 60 or older, and issues such as dementia-related wandering will become more prevalent. East Asia teaches us that meeting these demographic challenges will require new forms of governance, even in policy spheres like public security, where governments have zealously guarded their authority to dictate solutions to citizens. 

Traditional roles are breaking down and evolving. Police work is no longer defined solely by responding to crime but increasingly by safeguarding vulnerable populations. Policymakers will need to promote polycentric solutions by adapting each country’s existing infrastructure to scale multisector collaboration. Yes, this will break down institutional boundaries, redistribute responsibility across public, private, and community actors, and transform how governments, including the police, function, but this may be the only way to meet growing needs in aging societies.