Fort Lauderdale police are consulting psychic profilers to solve the nine-year cold case of missing 15-year-old Sophie Reeder — exposing that the billions poured into surveillance infrastructure produce nothing when actual police work is required.

The surveillance state watches you constantly. It failed to find a 100-pound girl walking alone at 2 a.m.

Sophie Reeder vanished from her Fort Lauderdale home on May 19, 2017. Surveillance video from her neighborhood shows the teen walking on a sidewalk around 11:30 p.m. A second camera captures her on Davie Boulevard just after 2 a.m., alone on a desolate street, headphones on, space buns in her brown curly hair. Phone and Google records place her last known location at an apartment complex less than two miles away — home to Leonard Jennings, a then-37-year-old convicted felon. The last call Sophie ever made was to Jennings' number at 3:07 a.m. Police call Jennings a "person of interest," not a suspect. Nine years later, no arrest. No resolution. Just cameras that watched her walk into the dark and apparently watched nothing else that mattered.

Now the Fort Lauderdale Police Department has taken what CNN reports is the "rare step" of consulting two psychic profilers. A department spokesperson told CNN: "Traditionally, FLPD does not consult anyone outside of law enforcement on ongoing criminal cases. However, in Sophie's case, our department is willing to try new and unique approaches for any chance at uncovering new information regarding her disappearance."

"New and unique approaches" — that's institutional speak for calling a medium because the system has exhausted its actual tools.

Sophie's father, Patrick Reeder, is not impressed. "I just don't get it," he told CNN. "A psychic?" His sister, Kirsten Milhorn, was more direct: the move is "a misallocation of resources."

One of the psychics, Alejandra Taborn, defended the work: "Not everyone is going to be open to a psychic medium. But what I have found is even if they're not, what else do you have to lose?"

What do you have to lose? The credibility of a police department. Public trust. Resources that could follow actual leads — like why a convicted felon was in contact with a 15-year-old girl at 3 in the morning and still isn't facing charges.

Here is the stake for every American: the surveillance state expands relentlessly — cameras on every corner, data harvested from every device, geolocation tracked in real time. But when a child disappears, when the system needs to work backward through evidence and build a case, it has nothing. The cameras captured Sophie walking. They did not save her. Nine years of investigative infrastructure later, the best FLPD can offer her father is a séance.

The surveillance state is not built to solve crimes. It is built to monitor you. When it fails, the institutions tasked with protection turn to theater — and call it innovation.

Where is Sophie Reeder? And why does it take a psychic to ask the question that a billion-dollar apparatus cannot answer?