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How Aging Populations Are Transforming Police Work Across Asia

In East Asia’s graying societies, police are becoming the “catch-all” agency for managing aging, like dementia-related wandering.

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 Diplomat