Washington’s new alert system is gaining international recognition for its work helping find Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People (MMIWP) and illuminating the true scale of the crisis.
In the 21 months since the Missing Indigenous Persons Alert (MIPA) system was implemented in July 2022, it has been activated 94 times. According to Washington State Patrol (WSP) spokesperson Chris Loftis, 80 of the reported missing people have been found, with 11 directly attributable to MIPA, as of March 19, 2024. Ten people have not been found, while another four were found deceased.
The MIPA data shows a massive disparity in missing cases between Indigenous Washington residents and the state’s population as a whole. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS), Washington had a rate of 8.04 people missing per 100,000 in 2023 — the fifth highest in the nation. WSP’s data show that for Indigenous Washingtonians, the missing rate was 34.32 per 100,000 — more than four times the general population.
“When this started, we had no idea how often it would be used, how successful MIPA would be [when] used,” Loftis said.
Roxanne White, the founder and executive director of the advocacy organization Missing Murdered Indigenous Women, People and Families, says MIPA was a result of years of grassroots activism by survivors and loved ones. She said it was crucial to put Indigenous families’ voices at the forefront.
“That person that’s missing has a relative that is grieving and fighting for justice for them,” White said. “And that’s the person that deserves to be speaking for their loved one.”
MMIWP cases in Washington are part of a larger global crisis of disappeared and murdered Indigenous people around the world. In Canada, Indigenous women make up less than 5% of the population but constitute 24% of female homicide victims. The same disparities have also been found in New Zealand and Australia; between 2000 and 2022, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that 315 First Nations women were murdered or went missing under suspicious circumstances. In Latin America, Indigenous women have been targeted after defending their land from extractive industries, such as the 2016 murder of Berta Cáceres in Honduras. A 2022 report by Survival International found that Indigenous Adivasi communities in India have similarly been targeted for their land defense. The International Federation of Social Workers considers MMIWP “an international human rights crisis of gender-based and racialized violence.”
White believes the violence against Indigenous people is ultimately driven by governments and corporations that want to exploit the land for profit.
“It’s genocide. It’s ongoing genocide and historical genocide and racism,” White said. “Why are Indigenous people targeted? Because we are the land, we are the caretakers of the land. We are the people that were targeted first for our land, for our home.”
The MIPA system was created in response to the lack of urgency among law enforcement agencies. In its 2019 report, Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) found that official databases routinely undercount MMIWP. In 2016, less than 2% of reported MMIWP cases were entered into NamUS, because people either weren’t identified as Indigenous or were left out altogether. When UIHI was able to identify perpetrators of the MMIWP cases, 83% were non-Native.
Loftis said officials from other states have reached out to WSP to learn more about how MIPA works and find out ways they could implement their own versions. This is particularly of interest just across the border in British Columbia, where the rate of MMIWP cases is one of the highest in North America. Highway 16 in northern British Columbia has been dubbed the “Highway of Tears” due to more than 40 known murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls along the route since the 1970s.
“There’ve been a number of states that have looked at what we’re doing and have tried to decide how best would that work in their communities and [if] there [is] a need for that,” Loftis said. “Or are there other vulnerable groups that need unique protections or unique attention to?”
Since Washington’s MIPA system was implemented, both Colorado and California have activated their own missing Indigenous persons alert systems. To date, more than 50 alerts have been sent out in Colorado, while California’s Feather Alert has only issued two out of five alerts that were requested. Indigenous leaders have criticized California’s system for its relative restrictiveness compared to Washington’s MIPA. Feather Alert requires law enforcement to be investigating the disappearance and to believe that the person went missing due to suspicious or unexplainable circumstances and is in danger, whereas MIPA only requires that the person who went missing is Indigenous.
In addition to issuing contemporaneous alerts, MIPA also allows families to submit reports of people who have been missing for years. As of Jan. 31, 71 MIPA notices were issued for people who have been missing for more than a year.
Last year, the Washington Legislature authorized a new cold case unit in the Attorney General’s office (AGO) dedicated to investigating older MMIWP cases. The unit is responsible for supporting missing people’s loved ones and providing resources to local law enforcement agencies. According to the AGO, Indigenous people make up 5% of all unsolved homicide cases in the state, despite being less than 2% of the overall population.
Although MIPA is a valuable tool, White is concerned about the potential gaps in its application. She said some of the families she’s worked with didn’t have an alert sent out or had to advocate with their local law enforcement agency to make sure it got sent. White added that in many cases, families don’t know they have the right to request an alert be issued for their loved one.
In one case that White worked on in July 2022 — just days after the MIPA system went into effect — the Burien Police Department did not send out an alert in part because it misunderstood the state law, as reported by the news site Next City. White also cited a history of racist and biased policing that has eroded trust between Indigenous communities and cops.
“They’re scared to even ask [about MIPA], because we’ve been historically met with prejudice,” White said. “It’s hard for families to even want to pick up the phone and call the police.”
Additionally, while more data is available about the MMIWP crisis, it doesn’t mean that the root causes of violence have been solved. Washington’s MMIWP task force, which is composed of local Indigenous leaders and politicians, released three new policy recommendations in December 2023. Two of these recommendations relate to cold cases: the task force called on the Washington Legislature to increase funding for DNA testing and forensic genetic genealogy, and to establish a work group to improve Indigenous demographic data collection practices. In this year’s session, the Legislature allocated $500,000 to support DNA testing for cold cases.
The third recommendation was for the U.S. Department of Justice to establish a nationwide MIPA system modeled after Washington’s. Loftis said a national MIPA could make Indigenous communities safer and deter perpetrators.
“That’s going to put the Indigenous community in a safer place,” Loftis said. “That deterrence over time on a national level could be a huge reversal of fortunes for many who have found themselves in that uniquely and critically vulnerable arena.”
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the March 27–April 2, 2024 issue.