2 years in, Washington's alert system for missing Indigenous people is working

Washington state was first in the nation to implement alerts specific to Missing Indigenous Persons more than two years ago. By the end of August this year, the State Patrol had issued 114 of those alerts, with the subject being located in all but 13 cases.

Law enforcement officials say these alerts play a crucial role in locating teenage runaways and have proven valuable in longer-term cases as well.

You’ve probably seen Missing Indigenous Persons Alerts in your email or online. They’re issued by the Washington State Patrol, at the request of local law enforcement, and they often feature the person’s photo, their age and some details about their disappearance.

Earl Cowan is the chief of police for the Swinomish Tribal Community, northwest of Seattle.

“As a chief of police for a native sovereign nation, it’s a great tool for us to put information out about somebody missing from our community to a very, very wide base very quickly,” he said.

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Cowan said statewide alerts are key. His agency requested one that located a 2-month-old infant being transported far south of the reservation by a non-tribal family member.

The alerts are meant to correct historic disparities. According to the Washington State Patrol, Native Americans are nearly 2% of the state’s population but nearly 6% of its missing persons' cases.

The disparities and lack of data on many cases were highlighted in a groundbreaking 2018 report by Seattle’s Urban Indian Health Institute which led to calls for more action, including the Attorney General’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People Task Force and the recent establishment of a cold case unit.

As part of these efforts, the Washington Legislature mandated the new alert system in March 2022.

Mark Williams is Chief of Police for the Suquamish Tribe, on the Kitsap Peninsula. He calls the alerts a huge step forward. He said the majority of alerts he has requested are for juvenile runaways, as with one recent case where the young person was spotted quickly on public transportation.

“We got a wave — I mean 10 or 15 — tips within a half an hour on a runaway we had, that was on a train in downtown Seattle,” Williams said.

Many of these young people run away more than once. Williams said he takes the alert process seriously each time.

At the Washington State Patrol, Carri Gordon oversees all the state’s missing person alerts. She said juvenile runaways make up the majority of the alerts, partly because federal law imposes strict requirements on police to enter missing persons in the National Crime Information Center within two hours of notification if the person missing is age 20 or younger.

Gordon sees the alerts as effective at getting runaway youth to make contact.

“I raised teenage boys and no teenager wants their poster plastered all over Twitter that they’re missing,” she said. “And when they see that, they’re like, ‘Oh crap, they really want to find me.’ And they turn themselves in.”

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Rosemarie Tom is the Legal Advocate and point of contact for families of missing persons at the Lummi Nation Victims of Crime office near Bellingham. Lummi Nation tribal police initiated the state's first Missing Indigenous Persons Alert after the system was created.

Tom said coordination between tribal and non-tribal law enforcement on missing persons has dramatically improved: People are being located in weeks rather than months.

“It is extremely rapid, we have everyone on board, there’s very clear communication and documentation that I have not seen in the past," Tom said. "So it’s been really transformative and wonderful support.”

She said that urgency is vital because human traffickers pose a huge risk to these teenagers.

Traffickers “can transfer them overnight over 100 miles or even across state borders with the promise of a better life or a nice relationship or, ‘It’s us against the world,’ and they usually start with romantic relationships,” she said.

With the improvement in jurisdictional issues and communication, Tom said tribal officials are turning their attention to addressing the situations that can prompt young people to run away, including domestic violence, mental health and substance use issues and other root causes.

“The alert and the response itself is very positive,” she said. “The aftermath and the recovery is a very different story. These aren’t happily-ever-after situations most of the time.”

The State Patrol’s Carri Gordon said one surprise has been that Missing Indigenous Persons Alerts have brought breakthroughs in some longer-term cases as well.

Thirty-five-year-old Besse Handy had been missing for more than a year when her mother asked state patrol to send out the alert.

“At the time we were like, 'Oh, I don’t know, that wasn’t really the intent of the program,'” Gordon said. “But the more we thought about it, we did it, and because of that a lot of things about the case itself came to light.”

Like the fact that Handy’s file lacked DNA and dental records to help identify her. Meanwhile, Handy’s mother Connie Samuels had been desperately searching for her daughter, even dreaming that Besse was back home.

“Because there’s always that little thing of hope in your mind that goes, maybe I’m going to see her again. Maybe I’ll find her. Maybe she’s alive," Samuels said. "That never stops.”

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Until you know for sure, she said. Thanks to the dental records, Samuels learned in January 2023 that Besse had died in a Seattle fire a year and a half earlier.

Now Samuels is raising the two children her daughter left behind. She says she hopes the Missing Indigenous Person Alerts can prevent those losses for the next family.

Dawn Pullin is one of the tribal liaisons at the Washington State Patrol who helps families navigate these searches. She said the alerts can take some of the burden off family members who in the past labored alone to get the word out, especially about missing adults.

“The success rate is amazing,” Pullin said. “What it does is it provides a professionalism to people searching for their loved ones, versus creating their own fliers or their own personal contact information on the internet.”