AMBER Advocate Magazine

Working with the Department of Homeland Security, Wayne County, Michigan, law enforcement officers posed as kids on a website where seven men—including a Wyandotte school teacher—thought they were setting up underage sexual encounters. But as each would-be predator made his way to meet the child, Taylor, Michigan, police used Flock Safety cameras/license plate readers (LPRs) to track the men and arrest them as they entered the city (five miles southwest of Detroit). Flock Safety traffic cameras log LPR data (including the vehicle’s make and model) for 30 days, and the information can be shared with law enforcement across the nation.

In 2023, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) CyberTipline received a staggering 36.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation. To counter that, a chilling new interactive video, “No Escape Room,” uses dozens of real-life tipline scenarios to immerse parents and caregivers into a child’s online world, often fraught with peril. Throughout the experience, users are prompted to engage in a conversation with someone they think is another teenager. The friendly, flirtatious chat soon involves requests for nude or sexually explicit photos, eventually trapping the child in a blackmail scenario. The video’s immersive viewpoint shows parents firsthand how children are targeted by predators and struggle to navigate dangerous circumstances. At the end of the experience, users are directed to NCMEC’s resources on sextortion.

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers signed dozens of bills in March that would invest $10 million in support of crime and human trafficking victims. A new formal partnership between Wisconsin Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force (WAHTTF) and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives (MMIWR) addresses the prevalence of human trafficking in Wisconsin’s Indigenous communities. In April, Wisconsin signed two new missing person alerts into law, an effort to strengthen the state’s existing AMBER Alert system. The Prince Act expands Wisconsin’s missing person alerts for children after the murders of 5-year-old Prince McCree in 2023 and 10-year-old Lily Peters in 2022. In both cases, law enforcement didn’t have enough information to satisfy the strict requirements for issuing an AMBER Alert. As part of the Act, a new Purple Alert includes missing children under age 10 and children under the age of 18 incapable of returning home without help due to a disability.

Is there hope for the hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women? An article by Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker begs this question, and the answer may lie in the strength of other Indigenous women. Lela Mailman became an advocate for the voiceless after her 21-year-old daughter, Melanie James, vanished in 2014 in Farmington, New Mexico, a city bordering the Navajo Nation. Local police and media outlets seemed indifferent; Melanie’s name was misspelled in reports, and wasn’t entered in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) until three years later. Mailman sought strength in numbers, joining with mothers of other missing children at marches, protests, and prayer gatherings. The #MMIW social media movement traces back to 2012 when Canadian journalist Sheila North, a member of the Cree Nation, began using the hashtag to raise awareness and spark action in Canada and the United States. “North was particularly struck by how many cases went unsolved—evidence, to her, that society regarded Native women as essentially disposable,” Monroe notes. Melanie James’ case is one of more than 4,000 unsolved cases of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Natives, according to The Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Listening to Melanie’s family tell their story, I had the uneasy thought that justice in her case might not look like answers, arrests, and convictions but, instead, like subsequent missing persons cases being approached respectfully and rigorously the first time around.”

Native American voters could decide major elections in 2024, and grassroots efforts are underway across swing states to get this important electorate out to vote as Democrats and Republicans vie for power. Key issues for Native Americans, particularly Native American women, include the high rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women, according to a 2023 First Nations Development Institute (FNDI) National Survey of Native Americans. This demographic is a powerful voting bloc with at least five million voters in the U.S. who identify as Native and Alaska Natives, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates.