How Native American police are fighting the crisis of missing people
By Andrew Hay
ISLETA PUEBLO, N.M. (Reuters) — As Detective Kathleen Lucero drives along a dirt road towards the Manzano mountains east of her New Mexico Native American village, she recalls the time earlier in her career when an elder told his family he was heading this way to water his cows. He didn’t come back.
It was back in 2009 when Lucero was a patrol officer, learning how to stop her people becoming part of the U.S. epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women and relatives (MMIWR).
She filed a report on the elder. Her police chief told her that was not enough. Following that advice, she started networking with outside police agencies.
“We got a hit,” said Lucero, a member of a traditional Isleta family, whose mother disowned her for a week when she decided to join the pueblo’s police 17 years ago because she wanted to become an «advocate» for her people.
Nine hours after going missing on the Isleta Pueblo just south of Albuquerque, the elder was found over 400 miles away by an Oklahoma traffic cop after his car ran out of gas, Lucero said. He was showing early signs of dementia.
That case was an early lesson that Lucero took to heart.
These days, as Isleta Pueblo’s chief criminal investigator, Lucero does not judge a victim for doing drugs, or running away. She doesn’t wait for them to show up. She starts investigating, posting their name and photo on social media, calling law enforcement contacts, maybe even television stations. Since 2015 she has handled eight such cases, with seven people found alive and one still missing.
“I believe that somebody knows somebody, and it keeps networking,” said Lucero.
Her prioritization of missing people, backed by Isleta police chief Victor Rodriguez, is not the norm
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