The New Mexico Department of Justice launched its new online portal Tuesday aimed at providing more information regarding the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Attorney General Raúl Torrez told KUNM the idea is to make information held by state and federal law enforcement publicly accessible and searchable.
RAÚL TORREZ: Part of the issue, I think, in addressing the challenge of missing and murdered Indigenous people, is a lack of clarity and transparency. And so we're trying to share in an interactive way, the information on all the outstanding missing person cases that are associated and held by the FBI.
KUNM: So what happens if an individual that’s missing isn’t currently in the database?
TORREZ: If they go through and they search a name, they discover that someone isn't in the list, what that means is that we need to have someone file a police report. The portal actually walks them through the process.
KUNM: So if someone is listed in the database and someone has new information on that individual, they can go to the portal?
TORREZ: We actually allow for a tip to be submitted and then routed to investigators here at the Department of Justice, and at the same time with our tribal law enforcement partners, because one of the things that we recognize is that there was confusion and frustration, frankly, on the part of the public where they didn't know where to go to submit information that might lead to the recovery of some of the folks that are included here. And so this is a first step in trying to make this information publicly available. But it's really the first of a multi phase process, where we're really going to start to deploy new resources, training and technology to tribal and local law enforcement partners across the state.
KUNM: So you can’t file a missing person’s report on the portal itself?
TORREZ: So what we do right now is point people to the respective law enforcement agency that's responsible for taking a report. And then making sure that if there's a tip that needs to be submitted for someone who's already included in the list, that will be directed to someone inside the Department of Justice. And we will then route that information to the lead agency that's responsible for it, but also the tribal agency. One of the things that we're trying to do is enable dual reporting, both to the responding agency and to the tribal law enforcement agency and then enable real time communication between the two of them. Phase two of the project is actually to develop new tools that we will go in and enable that kind of real time collaboration between tribal law enforcement partners, federal law enforcement partners, and state law enforcement partners. So they can start working on these cases in real time because the jurisdictional separation and the silos of information have really been a hindrance to solving some of these cases.
KUNM: In what type of ways, is the portal helping to further identify missing individuals?
TORREZ: One of the things that we realized is that the standard reporting only included a box that the person was Indigenous, but from our perspective, we need to have more particularity about what tribal community they're coming from. So we've included in the drop down menu, the specific tribal affiliation within the state of New Mexico and future iterations, we hope to actually include all tribal communities from across the country. So if someone is in enrolled member of a tribal community, let's say in the Pacific Northwest, but they went missing an Albuquerque, they will have the opportunity to flag that we can we can enable somebody in those communities to file the requisite or the necessary report, let's say in the Albuquerque Police Department, but also have a direct connection with the with the tribal law enforcement agency in the original jurisdiction.
KUNM: What do you hope this portal eventually becomes?
TORREZ: Well, ultimately, this needs to be a clearing house for timely, accurate, and reliable information, first and foremost, for law enforcement officers to take immediate action to try and initiate an investigation or hopefully engage in some action that will lead to the recovery of a missing person. But it also is going to be helpful, I think, for policymakers. The New Mexico Senate passed a joint memorial asking the Department of Justice to reconstitute the task force that was recently disbanded by the governor. And we're going to accept responsibility for leadership and that space, we're going to be building out that task force in the weeks and months ahead. But one of the things that I think is critically important is that that task force have access to accurate, timely and reliable data. And so what we're trying to do is give policymakers a reliable perspective on the size and scale and scope of the problem inside the state of New Mexico. And also inform them by doing such things as creating hotspot maps about places that are particularly high frequency of people who have disappeared. Are there patterns that we can recognize of some of these individuals and where they might have gone? All of that is going to start with reliable data that's going to inform the policy work of the task force.
Support for this coverage comes from the Thornburg Foundation
