Center for Investigative Reporting Reaching out to Websleuths for Help with New App

Dear Websleuths Members,

byardduncan is a professional Journalist/Community Manager for Center of Investigative Reporting.

The Center for Investigative Reporting is working on an app that will match up missing persons with unidentified remains.

byardduncan is coming to Websleuths in hopes of getting your input on developing the application.

I'll let byardduncan tell you all the great details. I know you can put your heads together and come up with some great ideas.

Thank you for all you do.

Tricia

Thank you, Tricia! And thanks to all the Web Sleuths for welcoming me into your community.

As Tricia mentioned, we're close to releasing an app that will allow you to more seamlessly match missing persons with un-ID'ed remains. I'll share a link to the app here as soon as it's ready – less than a month from now.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you. What are some of the basic technological challenges you encounter when searching for missing folks? What are some of the biggest frustrations?

sounds like a great idea! Any word on this yet?

byardduncan said:

What are some of the basic technological challenges you encounter when searching for missing folks? What are some of the biggest frustrations?

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Some of the biggest challenges and frustrations:

1) Cases not reported to NamUS.
2) Police withholding fundamental information, when there's no good reason to keep it secret.
3) Lack of access to morgue photos/dental records.
4) Poor recordkeeping. Misplacement of records and remains. Destruction of records and remains. Perfunctory and partial recording of information. Bad photography. Records not shared among agencies.
5) No integration among databases/websites containing information. No way to make all that dispersed information synoptically available. Lack of uniformity in presentation of info among sites.
6) Resistance of some officials to assistance of public.
7) Apathy among law enforcement in certain cases, when it comes to soliciting as much information as possible and sharing that information effectively.
8) Sheer number of cases in which information regarding missing people is not at all available online.
9) Lack of urgency/public funding for general use of genetic matching.
10) Lack of something equivalent to Crimestoppers reward program for reporting missing persons, providing information that helps lead to a match.
11) Lack of understanding that numbers of missing and unidentified represent what under other circumstances the media would term a public health crisis, because law enforcement's difficulty in solving these cases causes them to pile up, making it more difficult to solve them just by virtue of sheer numbers. And the inability to stop and punish responsible parties has consequences.

Could go on and on. What are you doing? Working on a Tinder to match the missing and the unidentified? Just go find Carl Koppelman. He'll tell you what you need to do.

So I guess the app never launched?

Soulmagent said:

So I guess the app never launched?

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It did:

The Lost & The Found

Note that the above site no longer updates because the Namus system has since been changed.

Would love to know the latest and whether there has been progress made with the NAMUS changes?

JudysSisterMaureen said:

Would love to know the latest and whether there has been progress made with the NAMUS changes?

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I must say The Lost and the Found was not a bad side at all. I used it a lot, until it was not updated anymore. I think Namus missed out somewhere when they dicided not to show the available identifiers any more. Also you can't register if you are not from the US ….annoying…. I hope alle the states of America will have a law that LE has to put all the missing and unidentified remains into Namus and before putting a UID in the ground, take DNA.

byardduncan said:

Thank you, Tricia! And thanks to all the Web Sleuths for welcoming me into your community.

As Tricia mentioned, we're close to releasing an app that will allow you to more seamlessly match missing persons with un-ID'ed remains. I'll share a link to the app here as soon as it's ready – less than a month from now.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you. What are some of the basic technological challenges you encounter when searching for missing folks? What are some of the biggest frustrations?

Click to expand...

The fact that only a handful of states require law enforcement to enter information about missing people and unidentified victims into NamUs is extremely frustrating. I’m not sure how (or if) this can be addressed in your app.

Thanks.

What happened to the app? Did it launch?

It launched but was never updated. I didn't even get to see it in its working form. I wish the people who originally cane to web sleuth would let everyone know what happened.
The Lost & The Found

The website worked great for a while. But when namus underwent a major overhaul, lost and found stopped updating new information and eventually quit working altogether. I loved using it very much.