A bill establishing a new missing person alert system in Arizona was signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Katie Hobbs.
House Bill 2281 proposed the creation of a new Turquoise Alert System that, once activated at the request of a law enforcement agency in Arizona, would trigger notifications statewide to help locate missing people under 65. The measure also stipulates that the missing person is considered to have gone missing under suspicious circumstances and be in danger.
Similar to the state’s Amber and Silver alert systems, the Department of Public Safety would manage the new alert. Its sponsor, Rep. Teresa Martinez, a Republican from Casa Grande, previously said the bill was meant to address cases of missing people who don’t qualify for Amber or Silver alerts.
However, she crafted the bill in collaboration with Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis, who has emphasized the measure was intended to address missing Indigenous people across Arizona.
The bill received support from Indigenous state Reps. Brian Garcia, Mae Peshlakai and Myron Tsosie, all Democrats, and advocates for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People who described the measure as years in the making.
The law was also named Emily’s Law in honor of Emily Pike, a San Carlos Apache teen who went missing after running away from a group home in Mesa earlier this year and was found brutally murdered on Valentine’s Day near Globe. However, it remains unclear if the new alert would help runaway children like Emily, as it requires them to be classified as endangered — a designation not all runaways receive.
Despite its origins, the final version of the bill no longer uses the term “Indigenous” and was amended to extend protections to any missing person under 65 who meets the alert’s other requirements. While these changes make the alert system more inclusive, they also shift attention away from the bill’s original intent: addressing the disproportionately high rates of violence Indigenous communities face — an issue long overlooked by government and criminal justice systems across the state and nation.
Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized Tribal Nations, and was identified in a 2018 study as having the third-highest number of Indigenous women and girls going missing or being murdered in the country.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System on Tuesday showed just more than 90 Native Americans were reported missing in Arizona. Another 68 children identified as “Indian” were also listed as missing on DPS’s missing children database as of Tuesday, though it’s unclear how many are Native American versus Indian from India.
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