Billy's Law ~ Bill would create national missing persons database for adults

[annalyzer]

Bill would create national missing persons database for adults

10:17 PM CDT on Friday, October 30, 2009
By SHELTON GREEN/KVUE News

The nation's missing children have one. There's even one for criminals. But there's no national database for missing adults in the United States.

Two federal lawmakers are hoping to change that with the introduction of "Billy's Law".

"If we can keep up the best we can with information about these people when they are found through a national database using all our resources through local, state, federal information then these people are more likely to be found and get back home", said U.S. Congressman Ted Poe, R-Texas, one of the two sponsors of "Billy's Law".

The proposed bill presently before the U.S. Congress is named after 31-year old Billy Smolinski of Conneticut, who has been missing for five-years. Billy's Law would do several things, including create one central database for the nation's law enforcement agencies and medical examiner's offices so information on missing adults or unidentifed bodies could be found in one place. The law would also provide federal money from the U.S. Department of Justice to purchase up to date databases for law enforcement agencies and it would provide funding for the nation's forensic units to pay for D.N.A. testing on unidentified bodies.

"If someone happens to die and they're an adult that information is not shared with other law enforcement agencies and that person remains a missing person in some jurisdictions", added Congressman Poe.

Such a database could prove invaluable to people like Liz Harris, an Austin mother whose oldest daughter, 18-year old Roxanne Paltauf, went missing in July of 2006. Paltauf vanished after having an argument with her boyfriend at a North Austin hotel. Countless searches, media coverage and even an appearance on the T.V. show America's Most Wanted yielded few to no clues.

Congressman Poe told KVUE he thinks Billy's Law will pass the U.S. House and Senate with no problem since it has bi-partisan sponsorship.

The congressman is hoping that Billy's Law becomes a reality by the end of the year.

http://www.khou.com/news/state/stories/khou091030_jj_bill-missing-person-adults.26bcec156.html

[Roamer]

We need this. I hope it gets done.

[packy]

definitely!

[LiveLaughLuv]

Absolutely necessary...I do believe this will happen.

It's the only logical thing to do. As the article states we have for missing children, we have one for wanted fugitives so it's futile that a missing adult database is created. This is the best way information can be shared between states. It's a win win proposal.

The proposed bill presently before the U.S. Congress is named after 31-year old Billy Smolinski of Conneticut, who has been missing for five-years. Billy's Law would do several things, including create one central database for the nation's law enforcement agencies and medical examiner's offices so information on missing adults or unidentifed bodies could be found in one place. The law would also provide federal money from the U.S. Department of Justice to purchase up to date databases for law enforcement agencies and it would provide funding for the nation's forensic units to pay for D.N.A. testing on unidentified bodies.

"If someone happens to die and they're an adult that information is not shared with other law enforcement agencies and that person remains a missing person in some jurisdictions", added Congressman Poe.

[Jute]

:innocent0001:

[foxfarmboxers]

I'll definately be praying for this one to pass.

[nanabillie]

I posted this on Billy's thread last night. If you click on the link you can sign the petition to help get this passed. You will also be able to email a link to your friends to help get the word around. Please, sign the petition! It will automatically be sent to your Representative.

[annalyzer]

I posted this on Billy's thread last night. If you click on the link you can sign the petition to help get this passed. You will also be able to email a link to your friends to help get the word around. Please, sign the petition! It will automatically be sent to your Representative.

Here is the link ~

http://www.change.org/actions/view/support_for_hr_3695_the_help_find_the_missing_act_ billys_law

[nanabillie]

Thanks Anna!

[nanabillie]

When I signed the petition, I was #82, now there have been 302 signed. But the goal if 5000! That's a long way. It is so simple. Sign your name and a letter is forwarded to your Representative. It's that simple. I emailed a link to all my friends and was so disappointed that not one has signed the petition. Too much trouble?
Over 12,000 have signed to save the polar bears from Global warming...?

[Faith]

Bumping for Billy. Please take 2 minutes out of your busy schedule and visit this website, provide your name, email and mailing address. A letter will be sent to your Congress representative, supporting the passing of HR 3695, The Help Find the Missing Act (Billy's Law). Who knows who the next missing person might be, could be any of us.

Thank you,

http://www.change.org/actions/view/support_for_hr_3695_the_help_find_the_missing_act_ billys_law

[annalyzer]

An Effort to Find the Missing Missing
New legislation in Congress would tie together the various data threads on the nation's missing persons.

January 29, 2010

Legislation named for a missing 31-year-old man would tie together the various data threads on the nation's missing persons.

A bill currently wending its way through the U.S. Congress seeks to simplify the way state and federal officials keep track of missing persons, as well as help keep family members informed of the progress of their cases.

The "Help Find the Missing Act" has been dubbed "Billy's Law," after Billy Smolinski, a 31-year-old Connecticut resident who went missing in 2004. Co-sponsored by Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, and Rep. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the bill would combine the National Missing and Unidentified Person System database, or NamUs, the only federal missing persons and unidentified remains database accessible to the public, with the National Crime Information Center, the FBI's database.

"A family that has lost a loved one to violent crime is forced to bear a terrible burden," said Poe during recent testimony before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. "This burden is made even worse when the family is not able to determine what exactly happened to their loved one."

There are more than 100,000 unsolved missing persons cases open at any given time, and nearly 4,400 unidentified human remains are found in an average year. Some of the latter are not only from those reported missing by friends and family members, but belong to the "missing missing," the drifters, runaways and prostitutes whose absence is never recorded.

As Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis professor Kenna Quinet told Miller-McCune in 2008, identifying the missing often is "an information issue. ... It's a matter of in the U.S. we did not have a system that linked missing persons and unidentified dead."

The bill, Murphy said during the same hearing, aims to fill some loopholes and address this situation. "Many local law enforcement agencies, medical examiners and coroners don't have the resources to report missing adults and unidentified remains," he said. "There is no central database to report missing persons and unidentified remains," and "many local law enforcement personnel do not know about the federal missing persons databases or how best to handle these cases."

Billy's Law aims to rectify this situation by combining NamUs and the FBI database, creating grants to encourage reporting to the connected databases and requires the Department of Justice to issue information about the databases, and the best ways to respond to these cases, through grants that would train personnel on how to submit information to the databases
"Looking for your missing loved one becomes a full-time job," said Janice Somlinski, Billy Smolinski's mother, who also testified at the hearing. "You have to continually hound the police, knock on doors, make phone calls, visit the media. NamUs makes this process easier as you can both enter information yourself and search the database. Moreover, the connected NCIC/NamUs database that the legislation creates increases the chances of finding answers."

http://miller-mccune.com/news/an-effort-to-find-the-missing-missing-1775

[rdwrites]

I'm at a loss here. There will surely be an investigative database with law enforcement information not released to public (FBI CASE system? NCIC?) and there is a publically available and updatable missing persons database (NAMUS).

No matter what law is passed, the FBI will still have a private investigative case database for law enforcement. Is the FBI not making entries into NAMUS? Does it require a law for them to do so?

I follow the FBI CASE system (and recently NAMUS) as I follow software development failures closely, in particular publically funded failures. The FBI CASE system development has failed multiple times at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. NAMUS is similar but much simpler and seemed to work ok, although I haven't done a lot of searching in it. Missing persons would seem to be a small subset of a national crime information center database (NCIC), and I don't know how integral it is to the current or replacement FBI CASE system, but I imagine it would be part of it.

Basically we have a situation where the FBI has been unable to replace their CASE system after many years of effort despite laws funding it, lots of oversight into the problems, etc. And now another law for something the FBI can already do if they want or will resist in hearings if they don't want to. There is a lot of problems with sharing of data between agencies and jurisdictions, as we have seen from 9/11 to even recently with the Christmas bomber despite laws requiring database integration on the books.

This seems to me to just require asking the FBI to make missing persons entries into NAMUS if they're not already doing it and if not asking why.

If that has already been done and a law to force them to do is the answer, then I think we have bigger problems than yet another law trying to force a solution.

By any chance have congressional sponsors addressed responses from FBI on this which they surely sought and received before submitting the legislation?

By the way, integrating NAMUS with a subset of NCIC would not be trivial in any event, and I sense another boondoggle failed project out of it. They should be able to automate some entries from their database to NAMUS pretty cleanly if they wanted to, and again, assuming they are already not doing so.

My opinion only. Thanks for making me aware of this commendable effort, HFTM.

rd

[annalyzer]

House passes 'Billy's Law' on missing persons
A measure named for Janice Smolinski's son, who disappeared in 2004, would help expand the database of missing people and unidentified remains, partly by requiring the FBI to share what it knows.

February 23, 2010 | 6:14 p.m.

Reporting from Washington - As the House on Tuesday approved "Billy's Law," a bill designed to aid families searching for missing loved ones, Janice Smolinski had more than a casual interest.

Her son, Billy, for whom the legislation is named, disappeared more than five years ago.

The measure, which seeks to expand online public information on missing people and unidentified remains, comes in the wake of missing-persons cases that have drawn national attention, including that of Mitrice Richardson, 24, who disappeared after being released from the Malibu-Lost Hills Station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in September without her car, cellphone or purse.

The legislation grows out of Smolinski's search for her son, who went missing at age 31 in 2004 in Connecticut. She said authorities think he was killed.

"In our search to find our son we encountered a Pandora's box," she testified at a recent congressional hearing. "And when we opened it, we unleashed the nightmare plaguing the world of the missing and the unidentified dead."

Smolinski and her husband, Bill, "met law enforcement that didn't understand how to handle an adult missing-persons case, and then ran into a national system of disconnected and inaccessible databases that didn't allow them to be true partners in the search," Rep. Christopher S. Murphy (D-Conn.) said Tuesday. Murphy is the Smolinskis' congressman and the bill's chief sponsor.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who was a sponsor of the bill, said that in Richardson's case, her family "would be able to access certain information updated by law enforcement and be better-equipped to monitor official activity and contribute to their own findings."

If a better-coordinated effort had been in place at the time of Richardson's disappearance, Waters said, "I'm confident that we'd have a better understanding of what happened to Mitrice Richardson."

Richardson's family has conducted four fruitless searches for the young woman, including one of the most extensive searches in the history of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.

While the online National Missing and Unidentified Persons System contains information on 2,856 missing people and 6,241 unidentified remains for public use, it doesn't include thousands of FBI records. Compounding the problem, authorities are required to report missing people under age 21, but not missing adults.

"It's likely that many missing-persons cases remain open for failure to connect missing-person profiles with unidentified remains that are being held," said Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas), another sponsor of the bill.

The legislation requires the FBI to share information, excluding sensitive and confidential data, with the public database. It authorizes $50 million in grants over five years to encourage state and local officials to share information on missing people and unidentified remains.

The grants program, Murphy said, would "make sure that all the information that a coroner may have in California is posted onto a national database so a family searching for their missing loved one in Connecticut has that information."

Smolinski, who has a 34-year-old daughter, never expected to be lobbying for federal legislation.

"We have tried to change the system so no family would have to endure the anguish that we have lived through these past five years."

A similar bill was introduced Tuesday in the Senate.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-missing24-2010feb24,0,6761785.story

[Paula]

Here is a link to a magazine article from 3/7/2010 with the headline "NamUs Missing Person Database Goes Unused by 93 Percent of Law Enforcement" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361037,00.asp)

[Paula]

Link below to an article printed today in a Vermont newspaper about NamUs.


Database cracks missing person cases (http://www.timesargus.com/article/20100308/NEWS01/3080302/1002/NEWS01)


I am happy that the media here is doing what it can to get NamUs out there.