Participants in the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls Day of Awareness made a human chain around the Wisconsin State Capitol on Friday, May 5 2023. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
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The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has announced a new alert code meant “to help save missing and endangered persons by delivering critical alert messages to the public over television, radio and wireless phone.”
The new emergency alert code for missing and endangered persons, announced Aug. 7, is called a MEP Alert.
AMBER Alerts, which stands for “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response,” an emergency notice for youth 17 years or younger who have been abducted, has been around for nearly three decades.
SILVER Alerts, in Wisconsin, are for those 60 years of age or older who are missing and are believed to have Alzheimer’s, dementia or other cognitive impairments conditions contributing to their missing status.
In April 2024, Wisconsin Act 272, the Missing Child Alert, was signed into law to expand criteria for issuing alerts for missing persons for those under 18 years of age who are “ believed not able of returning home without assistance due to a physical or mental condition or disability” or are under the age of 10 and their location is unknown and it is within 72 hours of disappearance and “their situation does not qualify for another alert (Amber Alert).”
The Ashanti Alert Act of 2018, according to a Bureau of Justice Assistance, “authorizes the U.S. Attorney General to establish a national communications network to enable and help facilitate regional and local search efforts for missing individuals who fall outside the scope of AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts,” including those “over the age of 17, missing adults with special needs or circumstances or missing adults who are endangered or have been involuntarily abducted or kidnapped.”
In its Aug. 7 announcement, the FCC noted the new MEP Alert would be “particularly beneficial to Tribal communities, where American Indians and Alaska Natives are at a disproportionate risk of violence, murder, or vanishing.”
The FCC notes that according to FBI statistics for 2023, there were 10,650 reported missing American Indian/Alaska Natives, of which 3,269 were 18 or older.
The U.S. Department of Interior Indian Affairs attributes the high rate of assaulted, missing and murdered indigenous people to “a legacy of government policies of forced removal, land seizures and violence inflicted on Native peoples.”
Because of historical trauma and the dissolution of cultural structure, Indigenous people have been vulnerable to bad actors within and outside tribal communities, and statistically, indigenous people have faced a much higher rate of violence, especially women.
Then 2016/17 National Intimate Partner Sexual Violence Survey – Report on Stalking noted that approximately 48.8% or one in two American Indian and Alaska Native Women had been stalked in their lifetime, a potential threat to their personal safety which is often a prelude to personal aggression/violence, including sexual assault or kidnapping.
The new MEP Alert is not just for Native Americans for all those who fit the criteria – 35% of the missing in America over 18 years of age are Black persons.
“Tribal, state, and local law enforcement agencies originate alerts using the Emergency Alert System by selecting from a group of event codes based on the nature of the situation,” according to the FCC. “For example, ‘CAE’ signifies a Child Abduction Emergency, otherwise known as an AMBER Alert. The new ‘MEP’ Alert code for missing and endangered persons who do not meet the criteria for an AMBER Alert will enable a more rapid and coordinated response to these incidents.”
In addition to sending the new MEP code through TV and radio, a message will be issued over wireless phones via the Wireless Emergency Alert system.
On July 31 in Prior Lake, Minnesota, Jessica Rosenworcel, chair of the FCC, talked to the Women Empowering Women For Indigenous Nations annual meeting where she spoke of the MEP Alert about to be announced.
“One week from now, the FCC will vote to make it easier to use television, radio and wireless phones to sound the alarm about missing and endangered persons,” she said. “This will save lives in communities across the United States. I traveled here to be with you today because I wanted you to know that this is happening. I also wanted to say thank you. The action the FCC is taking next week is in direct response to a call sent out by Native communities after enduring a crisis of the missing for far too long.”
She added, “You know the facts, but they bear repeating. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) estimates that there are more than four thousand cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Natives that are unsolved. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the numbers missing are more than two and a half times their share of the United States population.”
Rosenworcel noted that the AMBER Alert system has been very effective in finding young people.
“In fact, in one of our tribal consultations on this issue, a participant shared that her Tribe had issued eight AMBER Alerts and in all eight instances the missing child was successfully recovered,” said Rosenworcel. “AMBER Alerts demonstrate that there is a way to raise awareness when someone goes missing and increase the odds that we safely find them.”
Over the spring and summer of 2024, during four consultation meetings on the proposed MEP Alert, Bambi Kraus, Chief of the Office of Native Affairs and Policy for the FCC, interacted with tribal members.
“Native people, tribal nations have been aware of this issue, missing and murdered Indigenous persons,” said Kraus, a member of the Tlingit Nation of southeastern Alaska. “For generations, this has been of concern, and then recently, several federal agencies have started actively working on this issue. The United States Congress has been passing laws, and they’ve been signed into law, you know, not just bringing awareness to the issue, but trying to work on resolving issues that have led to some of the trauma that people have been experiencing for their loved ones to not just be murdered but also be missing.”
Krause said a resolution authored at the November 2023 National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) held in New Orleans and supported by Native Public Media, a tribal association operating radio stations, called for the FCC to create an emergency code that addresses “…the unique circumstances and challenges faced by missing and endangered American Indian and Alaskan adults.”
The resolution reads, “NCAI urgently petitions the FCC to establish a National Emergency Alert System (EAS) event code specifically designation for AI/AN (American Indian/Alaskan Natives) Missing and Endangered Persons (MEP). Such a code would ensure that missing and endangered AI/An adults who are over the age of 21 and thus not subject to AMBER Alerts are promptly identified and alerted via the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) to radio, television and both wireless and wireline internet platforms. Establishing a specific event code for missing and endangered AI/AN adults would guarantee the likelihood of locating and protecting the endangered individual in a timely and effective manner.”
During those spring and summer consultation meetings with tribes, Kraus said, she heard some “amazing stories” of how tribal people are trying to raise awareness and resolve the MMIW issue.
“So they (tribal communities) really were agents of change, and the commissioners (FCC commissioners) voted to adopt this (MEP Alert) unanimously earlier this month, and so now it is going to be implemented over the next year,” she said.
The FCC, according to Kraus, has a year from publishing in the Federal Register to fully implement the new MEP Alert.
“That doesn’t mean alerts aren’t going out,” she said. “It just means that to amend the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alert System there are software changes, some equipment changes, upgrades have to be done on the technical side, so there is a year of transition there before it would become enforced.”
Kraus was asked if a MEP Alert is needed within the next 12 months is there a guarantee it will deploy.
“I think it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s a great step forward and with any amendments to the Emergency Alert System and the Wireless Emergency Alert System, there are technical upgrades that have to go on behind the scenes,” she said, “so there’s a transition period of a year for those who send out the alerts to actually get it in place so that it can be used on the national level.”
Tribal Police
Timothy DeBrot, Sr., Chief of Police for the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, likes the new MEP Alert and believes it might also offer more flexibility than AMBER Alerts for those missing children who don’t meet the criteria of AMBER Alert, such as runaways. However, it appears the intent of the MEP Alert is for adults over 17, but Debrot is not the only one in Indian Country who perceives the new system could eventually be used as an alert for missing children not covered by the AMBER Alert system.
Issuing a widespread emergency announcement, DeBrot said, like an AMBER Alert, can be a very effective tool for law enforcement.
“If you’ve traveled the highways and the freeways around here, they’re always full,” he said, “and a lot of times that’s where the AMBER Alerts are put out, and the drivers see the notices on the electronic billboards, and I think that’s good because everybody has a cell phone. You know, hardly anybody is without a cell phone these days. So if they see that message, and they see a vehicle matching that description, or a person matching that description, they can call and get a hold of somebody right away and I think that’s good. That helps law enforcement a lot.”
Task force advocate
“We’re very excited about it,” said Rene Ann Goodrich, a member of the Bad River Tribe who has been an MMIW advocate since 2014, regarding the new MEP Alert. “It’s a huge breakthrough.”
Goodrich is also a member of both the Wisconsin and Minnesota MMIW Task Force and founder of Native Lives Matter Coalition and a member of Native Lives Matter Great Lakes and No More MMIWR (relatives) Great Lakes and the Indigenous Women Treaty Alliance.
She said both the Wisconsin and the Minnesota MMIW Task Force organizations have been advocating for this type of emergency alert for missing Indigenous people for years. “We’ve been talking about this for the past five years on how best we can utilize infrastructure that’s in place with our AMBER Alerts and our Silver Alerts to create a type of MMIW Alert,” she said.
She added, “This particular type of alert (MEP Alert) that was created is specific to indigenous peoples and endangered peoples, because our missing become missing for multiple reasons, and some of them are children. You know, and they leave of their own volition, so they didn’t quite fit missing persons guidelines reports for just making a missing person report.”
Like DeBrot, Goodrich believes the new MEP Alert will also be used for missing children who don’t qualify for an AMBER Alert. Historically, she said, missing Indigenous people have often not been taken as a serious concern by law enforcement.
“You know, a decade, two decades ago, you know, we were just kind of brushed underneath the rug that they’re missing because they’re drunk or they’re missing because they’re on drugs, or, ‘Oh, they just ran away. They’ll come back,’” she said. “We were burdened with a lot of stigma, negative stigma we were attached to. Our Indigenous populations were not being searched for or given 100% efforts that we would like to see.”
Indigenous people, she said, were often not given the attention a missing white person. All-consuming media attention to recent high-profile missing persons cases, while cases involving people of color are ignored, has been called “Missing White Girl Syndrome.”
The new MEP Alert system will cover broad areas, across different legal jurisdictions, even across state lines.
Tribal communities are considered sovereign nations and tribal law enforcement might or might not have a good working relationship with surrounding law enforcement agencies to communicate there is a missing person. The MEP Alert will issue a widespread call that puts the information out in multiple law enforcement agencies.
“This alert eliminates those jurisdictional issues that we run into,” said Goodrich.
Like DeBrot, Goodrich believes the large-scale MEP Alert will engage the public and help find missing persons. Specifically, she believes the MEP Alert will help interdict human traffickers who move their victims around quickly.
“These traffickers, they’re running circles around law enforcement,” she said. “We’ve located one house in Duluth where girls were being kept and when police go over there, they’re gone, moved to another house.”
Another outcome of having a widespread MEP Alert, Goodrich said, is that the alert will capture the attention of the media or raise the awareness of the missing person, resulting in more media attention.
Goodrich said one of the reasons Indigenous people have relied so much on Facebook posts to raise awareness of missing persons is the mainstream media, especially broadcast media, doesn’t give Indigenous missing persons, or any missing person of color, the same attention as missing white persons.
And because the MMIW movement also works to resolve murder cases, including some very cold cases, Goodrich hopes either the MEP Alert or another alert yet to be created will be available to share information about suspects who travel over jurisdictional lines.
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