Unsolved mysteries and missing persons on America’s Indigenous reservations

It's time to unify law enforcement databases and work with tribal law enforcementAlthough the national media was more than willing to redirect its national spotlight from the COVID-19 pandemic to focus on the sensational disappearance of Gabby Petito, the beautiful young blonde victim whose social media videos captivated America, it more than often pays little to no attention to thousands of other missing persons cases.

One group of missing persons and victims that rarely get attention from the media are missing Native Americans despite the fact that research shows violence against American Indian and Alaska Native women in the U.S. is a serious crisis.

As the former staff director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and a former federal and tribal prosecutor who handled tribal law cases as well as a victim’s rights attorney handling cases for the D.C. Crime Victim’s Resource Center, I took a deep interest in this problem and learned the following:Cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women continue to persist nationwide, but without more comprehensive case data in federal databases, the full extent of the problem is still unknown. As of 2016, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center reported 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls despite the Justice Department’s missing persons databases only reporting 116 cases.

The title of a recent, Oct. 28, 2021, Government Accountability Office report — “Missing or Murdered Indigenous Women: New Efforts Are Underway, but Opportunities Exist to Improve the Federal Response” — says it all in that the government’s efforts in this area are lacking. The report highlighted the need for better law enforcement coordination and reporting of missing Native Americans.

Specifically, GAO cited that “relevant DOJ and Department of the Interior (DOI) law enforcement agencies that investigate cases of missing or murdered women in Indian country have engaged in other efforts to address the crisis, but they have not implemented certain requirements to increase intergovernmental coordination and data collection in the two 2020 laws, which remain unfulfilled past their statutory deadlines.”

This raises the obvious question as to why it is so difficult to provide much needed statistical information to assist in finding missing people. Part of the problem may be read between the lines of the aforementioned GAO report as there are four separate and distinct federal law enforcement agency databases recording information on this ongoing crisis.

When I asked Charlie Addington, the former director of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Office of Justice Services about this, he explained, “There was not a mandatory reporting requirement under the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) to report missing persons. The FBI will generally not collect any information unless a criminal matter has been established in a missing person case and coordination issues will not be resolved unless there are better cooperation efforts among all the stakeholders in the development of a new or enhance data base. This could take some time.”

These databases include the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and its National Incident-Based Reporting System, the National Institute of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System,