Missing and Unidentified Persons Awareness Month

May is Missing and Unidentified Persons Awareness Month

Missing and Unidentified Persons Awareness Month is observed in May. According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, over 600,000 people go missing in the U.S. each year. Although a large number are found, there are still thousands who stay missing for over a year. Missing and Unidentified Persons Awareness Month informs us that cases of individuals who are missing for over a year are also considered “cold cases.” A cold case is defined as “an unsolved criminal investigation which remains open pending the discovery of new evidence.” Unfortunately, thousands of families and friends of missing persons wait years for cold cases to be solved. Wear red or yellow for Missing and Unidentified Persons Awareness Month. Personalized Cause offers both red and yellow enamel awareness ribbon pins, fabric ribbons, and red or yellow silicone wristbands for this important awareness month.

Wear red or yellow for Missing and Unidentified Persons Awareness Month!

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) is a national centralized repository. It is also a resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases across the United States. NamUs helps investigators match long-term missing persons with unidentified remains to resolve cases and bring resolution to families.

At any given time, up to 100,000 persons may be reported missing in the United States. In addition, as many as 600,000 are reported annually. While many of these individuals are found alive and well, some become long-term missing persons. At the same time, federal, state and local death investigators are constantly working to provide names to thousands of deceased persons nationwide. In 2018, over 11,000 sets of unidentified human remains were held in medical examiner and coroner offices throughout the U.S. NamUs was created to assist with identifying these decedents. This enables investigators to match long-term missing person cases and offer professionals free forensic services.

New DNA Technology

In 2003, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) began funding major efforts to maximize the use of DNA technology in our criminal justice system, including in the investigation of missing and unidentified person cases. By 2005, NIJ expanded its efforts with the “Identifying the Missing Summit,” where criminal justice practitioners, forensic scientists, policymakers, and victim advocates defined major challenges in investigating and solving missing and unidentified cases. As a result of that summit, the Deputy Attorney General created the National Missing Persons Task Force, which identified the need to improve access to information that would help solve missing and unidentified person cases. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) was created to meet that need.

National Institute of Justice

In collaboration with NIJ, the National Forensic Science Technology Center (NFSTC) and Occupational Research and Assessment (ORA) developed and launched the NamUs Unidentified Persons (UP) database in 2007. The following year, the NamUs Missing Persons (MP) database was launched. Then, in 2009, the databases were connected for automatic case comparisons. This expanded the power of NamUs to make associations between missing and unidentified persons. NFSTC managed the NamUs program through September 2011, in partnership with NIJ.

Several years later, in 2011, daily management of the NamUs program was transitioned to the University of North Texas Health Science Center (UNTHSC). There is, however, continued administration and oversight by the NIJ. Management through the UNTHSC’s Center for Human Identification enhanced NamUs’ ability to facilitate DNA services. This enhanced the quality and quantity of DNA information entered into NamUs.

In 2012, an Analytical Division was added to NamUs. This offered criminal justice professionals additional resources to locate information on missing persons. In addition, they were able to locate family members for DNA sample collections and next of kin death notifications, and disposition tips and leads. Also in 2012, the NamUs AFIS/Fingerprint Unit was created. This brought additional in-house forensic services to NamUs. It also included a collaboration with the FBI’s Latent Print Unit to search all unidentified decedent prints. This is done through the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system.

Further, in late 2015, plans to perform a complete rebuild of the NamUs application began. Stakeholders from the law enforcement, medical examiner, coroner, non-profit, and public sector were interviewed as part of a Discovery Phase to plan the features and functionality of the upgraded system. Finally, development work began in the first quarter of 2016 and culminated in the release of the NamUs 2.0 application in May 2018.