I can't defend the education system, nor do I wish to as I have not attended a school in this country. I will readily admit that many institutions of learning are far from being what they claim.
The deal is this. In the PN as in the army, the rank and file do not make decisions, they follow orders. The Majors, Colonels and Generals on the other hand do make the decisions. All have what constitutes an advanced education degree and have been within the ranks of the PN for more than a decade and some Generals since they were first weened it seems.
This is not the first tourist to go missing and it isn't a completely unique set of circumstances although some aspects definitely are. Nature imbued humans with the ability to learn from their experiences as a survival strategy. One cannot progress through a policing career without picking up some useful insights and practices along the way. All of these leaders have training and experience that should amount to more than someone who just watches Cops on TV on Saturday night.
This was not a case where it can be assumed that the missing adults chose to just up and disappear. They don't live here, they have a flight booked and a rental car to return. They told people they were going to the airport right up until the time they left the resort. There are not a whole lot of ways to get from Samana to the SD airport - at least that your average tourist would choose to take when running late and in the dark. It doesn't require a rocket scientist of a commander to ensure the boots on the ground have requested video fottage from the toll booths early on. That route would be the one I figure most tourists would take. The police could very easily have determined the exact time they left the hotel. Within a day or two, the PN would have had the 1:41 video identified and could then forget for the time being about interviewing tour guides in Limon. They would know that the missing couple was somewhere between SD and say La Romana in the south of the country and if they strayed into SD or La Romana there would be more video somewhere of them doing so.
I get that it is uncool to call someone stupid and any excuse to provide cover is better than nothing in a pinch. Come one people, the women was in the custody of the healthcare system and in the records of the 911 system. There has to be a call on record somewhere from the hospital to the police. At the very least the police admitted to contacting the hospital on their own much later along the time line.
All of the cards were on the table, all someone with a slight amount of acumen had to do was look at them and the obvious would have jumped up and bit them on the nose. If you want to excuse this level of ineptitude away, go ahead, you do so at your own peril. I don't buy it. From the outset, it would appear that the right people were not put on this case and there was no competent high ranking officer specifically tasked to provide leadership and oversee this investigation. If that had been done, given the common sense that experienced leadership is supposed to bring with it, two chickens and a hamster could have found the women within 72 hours.
No one here on DR1 has offered any sort of justifiable reasoning why highly educated and experienced police commanders who have conducted innumerable searches before dropped a ball that was placed right into their hands in that the movements of the missing were straight forward, easily discoverable and there were no third party players to complicate things. When you are searching for a missing women, there is no way it takes two weeks to look into every Jane Doe in a hospital between SD and La Romana. While some say the PN had no way of knowing that the women was that close at hand. I counter, if they had just checked, because they had no info to suggest she wasn't close at hand, half of the missing duo wouldn't have been missing anymore.
Say and believe what you will. The Command responsibility really had to work at screwing up such a simple and straight forward inquiry. In fact the only way this could have played out as it did is if no one above the rank of Lieutenant showed up for work during that first week to ten days.
As an after thought, all along I have been assuming the police wished to find these people. Upon reflection, I have to admit I have no facts to support that initial premise.
