DENVER — The FCC is proposing a new national alert they believe can help thousands of Indigenous people that have gone missing. The concept is similar to an Amber alert, but for missing and endangered adults.
Colorado created a similar alert in 2022 but some supporters said it's not being utilized as it should be.
"It is a crisis, a big one," Raven Payment said. Payment is a member of the Missing & Murdered Indigenous Relatives Task Force of Colorado. A few years ago, she was one of the supporters of SB 22-150, a bill that became law and created the Missing Indigenous Persons Alert system for the state of Colorado.
"Statistically we have found that one native person goes missing a week in the state of Colorado and that is also not addressing every Native person that has gone missing that did not get an alert so again it's a crisis," Payment explained. Previously, Payment said it had been a struggle to get agencies to push these alerts.
Monycka Snowbird, another member of the task force, shared that same sentiment.
"It's never going to end, unfortunately," Snowbird said back in January. "When my own son was missing it took them 6 or 7 days to issue his alert and they were supposed to do it in 8 hours and that's my son."
Indigenous people have been going missing at an alarming rate.
So much so, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposes a national missing persons alert, they're seeking comment on whether an additional alert should be made specifically for missing Indigenous people.
"Just the fact that this has been at the forefront of conversations about this alert has been cautiously positive is how I would put it," Payment added. She doesn't know if the national alert will make the statewide one any better — all she can do is hope for change.
"We just encountered law enforcement officers at the Denver March Pow Wow that had no idea that this alert existed and you know it's been over a year," Payment explained. "We'll see what happens."
The FCC will seek public comment on the proposal before moving forward with a final vote. The FCC report pointed out Native Americans are 2.5% of all missing person cases despite making up 1.2% of the U.S. population.
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