Mary Annette Pember
ICT
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — It was only 5:30 p.m. but dusk had already descended at the Alaska Law Enforcement Officer’s Memorial in Anchorage.
The gentle rain that had been falling all day had grown cold and penetrating, but Michael Livingston was determined to speak to ICT at the memorial about the unsolved cases of murdered Indigenous people in Alaska.
“This memorial is dedicated to Alaska law enforcement officers who have been killed in the line of duty. None of these names will ever be removed regardless of subsequent findings,” said Livingston, a retired Anchorage police officer.
“But the state of Alaska Department of Public Safety recently removed 23 victims’ names from their list of cold case homicides,” he said.
State officials said the cases were removed because they were old and likely to remain unsolved. Several of those victims have been identified as Indigenous, although the exact number of Indigenous victims is not yet known.
The disparity was stunning for Livingston, Aleut from the Alaska Peninsula, who is an advocate for missing and murdered Indigenous peoples.
“It’s just so disrespectful,” he said.
Lack of transparency
Alaska has long topped lists in the U.S. for violence against women, especially Indigenous women, who are killed at 10 times the rate of White women in the state.
State and federal lawmakers have repeatedly promised to address the disparity with increased funding and services for law enforcement. In 2024, Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed into law Senate Bill 151, which promised DPS commitment to investigating cold cases, required Indigenous cultural training for police officers and created an MMIP review commission.
In May, Dunleavy signed a proclamation requiring Alaska law enforement to enter missing persons into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has long called attention to the lack of reliable data surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous peoples, and has sponsored legislation such as Savanna’s Act, a 2020 law that directs the Department of Justice to develop guidelines for better coordination among law enforcement and improved data collection for missing and murdered Indigenous peoples.
After so many promises to take action on the MMIP crisis, however, the omission of murder victims’ names from the DPS list was especially disappointing. And with unfortunate timing, the agency released the redacted list in May on a day set aside to honor victims of homicide, Livingston said.
Austin McDaniel, communications director for the DPS, declined an interview request from ICT. But McDaniel spoke to Rhonda McBride of KNBA, a Koahnic Broadcast Station.
“There were a couple of examples of cases that had very limited physical evidence, essentially no physical evidence,“ McDaniel said. “And then all of the witnesses and suspects we may have had are now deceased, so there’s no viable investigative path forward.”
Charlene Aqpik Apok, Inupiaq, executive director of the nonprofit Data for Indigenous Justice, said families continue to wait for answers.
“You can’t just erase people, especially when you’re talking about families who really miss their loved ones,” Apok told ICT.
Apok, victims’ families and other advocates founded the organization in 2018 in response to the lack of law enforcement data. The organization now tracks data for missing and murdered Indigenous peoples.
“We had a rally and wanted to read the names of loved ones who had been killed only to learn there was no tracking data from DPS,” she said. “So families came to us and shared stories and that became the heart work of our database. Since then we’ve been stewarding and tracking names and continuing to see gaps in state data.”
Apok was surprised at DPS’s response to the initial open records requests for what she and others considered basic information such as names and race of victims. The agency rejected the requests, claiming the work of gathering the information would take too long.
An article produced by the Anchorage Daily News in partnership with ProPublica about the state’s refusal to release the data included a response from McDaniel.
“We do not keep lists of victims of any type of crime, including homicide victims, and to fulfil this request, DPS would have to manually review incident reports from multiple years to create a record that matched what you are looking for,” according to a statement.
DPS eventually released the names and racial information after Data for Indigenous Justice successfully appealed the decision.
After years of repeated open-records requests from victims’ families, journalists, activists and Livingston, the Alaska State Troopers finally updated its list of cold case homicides in September, but with the 23 victims removed from the list.
Livingston also credits a resolution created by the Alaska Federation of Natives in 2019 for moving the release of names forward.
Cold case crisis
Alaska is not unique in its lack of data collection for crime victims. Although there are several citizen-maintained databases, there is currently no unified national database of murder victims’ names.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NAMUS, funded by the Department of Justice, relies on voluntary reporting from law enforcement. A study by the Urban Indian Health Institute found that nearly 60 percent of 71 police departments surveyed either did not respond or provided only partial or compromised data.
And the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project found that police departments failed to report nearly 3,000 homicides to the Department of Justice in 2018. Agencies cite lack of funding, technology and personnel as reasons for failing to collect data.
Pennsylvania State Trooper Tom McAndrew, who served as an expert on the Department of Justice Cold Case Investigation Working Group, said cold cases should not be forgotten.
“Cold cases constitute a crisis situation,” McAndrew said in a blog post published on the Department of Justice website. “History and research show that a violent offender will likely repeat.”
The clearance rate for murder cases — those that result in arrest or are otherwise solved — is shockingly low in the U.S. According to the The New York Times, about 58 percent of murder cases were solved in 2023. As time passes, unsolved cases join the growing list of cold cases, which languish often because of limited funding and resources.
Increasingly, nonprofit organizations, advocates and victims’ families are holding law enforcement’s and lawmakers’ feet to the fire in addressing the cold case crisis.
According to Apok, the recent release of information by the DPS has been the direct result of work by families, advocates and Data for Indigenous Justice.
“We’ve been working since 2018, doing FOIA requests and calling for transparency to see which cases the police are working on,” she said. “You can’t lose hope. We see cases come back decades later with new information.”
Indeed, Livingston is a tireless advocate for law enforcement transparency and citizen involvement in raising awareness about MMIP, as well as helping police solve cold cases.
“Police cannot solve cases, especially cold cases, on their own,” Livingston said. “They need the help of the citizens.”
Livingston shivered in the cold rain as the interview ended, his hair, now soaked, clung to his skull.
“Did you get it; could you hear me? Could you see me?” he asked anxiously.
“Yes,” ICT responded. “We heard you loud and clear.”