‘Fill in that gap': Arizona hopes to have Missing Endangered Persons alert system live by summer
Miss Indigenous stands near community activists holding a poster with the names of Native American people lost to violence. The position is an Arizona State University student-led effort to bring awareness and representation to the school and elsewhere. Photo by Gloria Gomez | Arizona Mirror/University of Arizona
For years, Indigenous families have shared their experiences of reporting a missing loved one, highlighting how it is often met with a lack of response or urgency from the entities meant to assist them.
'We do know that there is a huge issue,' Capt. Paul Etnire, tribal liaison for the Arizona Department of Public Safety, said.
Etnire is Hopi and grew up on the Hopi Nation in northern Arizona. Since 2019, he has worked in ad hoc committees, task forces and federal committees focused on addressing the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples.
'It was very heartbreaking hearing testimonies,' he said of the state and federal hearings held to allow MMIP victims to share their experiences.
The blame, he said, belongs across the board: law enforcement, prosecutors, social services, tribal governments, non-tribal communities and Indian Country.
'The whole system failed,' Etnire said.
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'It was just heartbreaking that we failed in every single way for the victims and for the victims' families,' he added.
Finding ways to address and develop solutions for the MMIP crisis within Indian Country has been a priority for Indigenous women, leaders, advocates and communities for years.
Part of that work included advocating for the creation of a multijurisdictional missing persons alert system — something that is finally about to become a reality as states across the country, including Arizona, work to implement the Federal Communications Commission's new Missing and Endangered Person alert code.
In March, Gov. Katie Hobbs met with several key stakeholders, including the Arizona Department of Public Safety and representatives from tribal nations, to develop a plan for implementing the new alert code by summer.
'I know that so many families have been affected by this crisis and have fought for years,' Hobbs told the Arizona Mirror, adding that she hopes that, with the implementation of the MEP alert, these families will finally feel a sense of justice.
Hobbs said that when an Indigenous person goes missing, a lot of times their case does not rise to the level of getting an Amber, Silver or Blue alert, and the goal of the MEP alert is to 'fill in that gap.'
'As governor, I see my role as elevating those voices and making sure we're taking action on the issues that matter most to communities across the state,' Hobbs said. 'And this is just one example of that.'
The governor said that implementing the FCC's new MEP alert in Arizona was prioritized based on the recommendation from the MMIP task force, and seeing it come to fruition is great and validates the task force's work.
'It's important to keep the work going,' she said.
The MEP alert code will be used for missing and endangered persons who do not meet the Amber and Silver Alert criteria, according to the FCC, enabling a more rapid and coordinated response to these incidents.
The FCC adopted the new alert code in 2024, stating that it will be especially beneficial to tribal communities, where Indigenous peoples face a disproportionate risk of going missing, experiencing violence and murder.
The whole system failed.
– Capt. Paul Etnire, Arizona Department of Public Safety
More than 10,600 Indigenous people were reported missing in the U.S. in 2023, roughly 3,300 of whom were 18 or older, according to the FBI.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System reported that more than 23,700 missing persons cases were in the database at the end of 2023, and 255 of those were for Indigenous people.
In 2021, Arizona was ranked as the state with the third-largest number of unresolved missing Indigenous people cases in the country, according to NamUs. There are currently 91 missing Indigenous people cases in the NamUs database for Arizona.
A study from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Arizona also has the third-largest number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the country.
That study reported 506 known cases in 71 urban areas across the country, 54 of which were in Arizona, including 31 in Tucson.
There is still no single database that provides accurate numbers or data related to missing and murdered Indigenous peoples across the country. With no centralized database among the thousands of federal, state and tribal entities, the information available is limited.
When looking at the numbers, it's important to note that Indigenous people make up only about 6% of the population in Arizona. The state has only three major metropolitan areas, all of which have large Indigenous populations, and each of the 22 tribal nations in Arizona has a large number of people living on their tribal lands.
In Arizona, the recommendation for a missing endangered persons alert was first made in 2022 by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls ad hoc committee and has continued as a recommendation by the task force.
Jason Chavez, who leads Hobbs' Office on Tribal Relations, said there has been positive feedback from tribal leaders and tribal law enforcement regarding the implementation of the MEP alert.
Chavez said that tribal leaders and communities have long called for this type of alert, and the MMIP task force has advocated for it.
'Under the governor's leadership, we're finally ready to implement,' he said.
Increasing public awareness about MMIP is a challenge, Chavez said, but he believes that once this alert goes live, it will help shed some light on the ongoing crisis.
'This is one step in the right direction,' he added.
According to the FCC, the MEP alert is part of the nation's Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alert System.
It will be part of a set of codes utilized by tribal, state and local law enforcement agencies with access to the system, delivering a critical alert message to the public through television, radio and wireless phones.
The Arizona Department of Public Safety will utilize the IPAWS alerting system for MEP alerts. This system can send alerts to specific locations, as narrow as the cross streets where a person went missing or as broad as the state.
Once the alert is set up in the system and activated, it will immediately be pushed out to the public. The language in the MEP alert will closely resemble that of Amber and Silver Alerts.
Capt. Thomas Neve, with the Arizona Department of Public Safety Emergency Management District, oversees the operations of Arizona's alert system.
Neve has worked with the alert program for over a decade. He said the department has offered a Missing and Endangered Persons Advisory, but never an alert.
Neve said that DPS issues about 150 emergency alerts annually. In 2024, they dispatched 131 Silver Alerts, but no Amber Alerts and 16 missing endangered person advisories.
He said the MEP alert now allows them to send out an alert through TV broadcasts, radio and cellphones in real time when a person goes missing.
'It's a little bit of extra horsepower,' he said, adding that it sends the messages out all at once, which ensures consistency in the messaging.
The U.S. Department of Justice will release guidelines on pushing out MEP alerts, but they have not been released yet. Neve said they are preparing to fully establish the alert for Arizona so that they are ready when the guidelines are released.
We need a collective effort to bring our relatives home.
– Navajo Nation Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty
In general, Neva said the agency's first step is to verify that the report does not fall into any of the other alert categories and ensure that the reporting agency has identified that the missing person has truly gone missing.
For instance, if the missing person is a minor, Neve said it needs to be verified that it is not a runaway or part of a custody issue where the biological parent may have taken the child, and that there isn't any danger to the child.
'Sometimes, people are reported missing because they didn't come home, but that doesn't mean they didn't go to another residence,' he said, which is why there are a lot of things that need to be done by the local agency before an alert is considered.
Neve said that agencies across the state have the potential to find that person without having to issue an alert, which is why part of the process of being eligible for an MEP alert is that the reporting agency needs to have exhausted all their available resources first.
'We recognize that some agencies are much larger than others that have better capability of doing that, but every agency has the basic capability of at least entering that person as a missing person,' he said.
Once that local agency has exhausted those resources and they otherwise meet the criteria, Neve said the final step would be an MEP alert.
The local agency would request an MEP alert from the Arizona Department of Safety. Once their criteria are approved, Neve said they evaluate the request and determine whether it qualifies.
'We're the gatekeepers,' he said. 'We would facilitate that activation on behalf of that agency, making the request.'
Neve said it is important to have a clear guideline for what constitutes an MEP alert because there is potential for overloading the public with alerts that it 'desensitizes the general public' to the point that they ignore the alerts.
'There are several thousand missing person cases a year in Arizona,' Neve said, and having an alert does not guarantee success in missing person cases.
However, Neve said having an MEP alert is a 'big step' because it solicits the public's help finding these missing people and bridges the gap in other alerts.
All Arizona tribes can make an MEP alert request, and Neve said they would work closely with any tribal agencies.
'It doesn't matter if the tribal person went missing on or off the reservation; we can do an activation for that person,' he said.
Etnire said that the MEP alert system is not the tool that will end the crisis of MMIP, and it should not be viewed as such.
'This is not the tool that will end this,' he said.
Etnire said implementing the MEP has been a long time coming and the alert technology is another tool they can capitalize on.
'This is not the thing that's gonna solve the issue of MMIP within this country (or) within the state,' he said, but it is a tool that law enforcement can use to hopefully fill in some of those gaps with the Amber Alert Program and the Silver Alert Program.
Etnire said that for a tool to be effective, it has to be used.
'It's not just incumbent upon local law enforcement to utilize,' he added. 'We have to work together as a whole.'
Navajo Nation Council Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty said she hopes that as Arizona works through implementing the MEP alert, there will be a clear idea of how the multiple agencies can work together to push the alerts.
'We need a collective effort to bring our relatives home,' Crotty said, noting that the first 24 hours are vital for missing people.
'It's another layer of collaboration and data because of the different jurisdictional issues that we chronically have,' she added, noting how the Navajo Nation spreads across three states and the tribe has a large population living on and off the reservation.
She said having an MEP alert available is crucial for tribal communities because it enables them to notify more people and potentially increases the number of individuals searching for the missing person, which 'hopefully decreases the trauma for the family.'
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