Posted on 06/05/2021 9:39:52 AM PDT by bgill
Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill that requires law enforcement to enter missing persons case details into a national database.
House Bill 1419, also known as “John and Joseph’s Law”, also requires a justice of the peace or a medical examiner to enter details about unidentified bodies into the same database, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.
Case details can include dental records, fingerprints and clothing descriptions.
HB 1419 is named after John Almendarez and Joseph Fritts of Houston — whose respective families had to wait several years before their bodies were identified.
(Excerpt) Read more at kxan.com ...
It may have been SOP in many jurisdictions, hit and miss in others, and unheard of in others. No reason not to do it, I would suppose.
Boy howdy, that is one strange headline.
This is a problem of funding and mission. Let’s say you are the ME of a small county with little in the way of facilities and no real funding. So, I’m guessing this would be a regular doctor who comes in from another locality when they have a body. He’ll come in because most unattended deaths require a doctor to certify that it wasn’t murder. My mother died in hospice care, but a medical examiner was required to certify that it wasn’t a murder. While in transit to where she died I got a call from the ME asking me about the circumstances of her fall, two weeks prior. He filled out a report. The substance of the report was that she’d died of natural causes.
So, in our scenario the doctor came in from a nearby town, examined the body and signed the appropriate paperwork. The hospital then releases the body to whoever has the contract to take care of disposal. Nobody has the responsibility of taking the time to enter that information into some national database.
Now, all deaths ARE reported nationally. I don’t know who, in this scenario has that responsibility. And, this must happen within a certain period. The reason is, in the fifties someone realized that if the Soviets used a biological weapon there was no way for the government to know that we were under attack as there was no database collecting death information. And, this database was how they identified anomalous deaths at, I believe, “Love Canal.” It turns out that Ely Lilly had a glass factory making uranium glass there in the eighteenth century and the radioactive waste was causing an anomalous number of cancer deaths.
Therefore there is reporting of all deaths now. But most rural counties don’t have the framework in place to do this as part of the process of investigating deaths and disposing of corpses. To put this in perspective, “A total of 2,839,205 resident deaths were registered in the United States in 2018.” That’s 7779 deaths per day. If you’re already working your full time job in whatever capacity in the above scenario, then you don’t really have the time, or pay, to register all the required information. That’s why many counties simply don’t do it.
Watching the History Channel series I (Almost) Got Away With It, it is disheartening, and discouraging to see how many times someone with a murder warrant in one state is arrested and fingerprinted in another, only to be released on his own recognizance.
Described by her friend, Ari Fleischer: Kamala Harris Is "A Big Mystery In Charge Of A Lot," "We Don't Know What She's Capable Of" Nobody has seen her "She won't hold a news conference. She doesn't take a lot of questions from reporters. She's a big mystery in charge of a lot." AWOL since Jan 6, 2021
When the Ochoomer was in office Arizona was or was close to running out of morgue storage space. It was a real problem.
“it is disheartening, and discouraging to see how many times someone with a murder warrant in one state is arrested and fingerprinted in another, only to be released on his own recognizance.”
Certainly, no slight was taken. As for the excerpt above, we need to ask ourselves just how much oversight do we want the police (government) to have? For all of the good uses you can think of there are just as many bad uses. The government already has an astonishing amount of information...should we, as is happening in some European nations, all be registered in a DNA database? And, let’s say it is only used to catch criminals...then, someone decides that a certain combination of genes causes criminal behavior. Well, there’s a national database and we can locate every one of those people. It becomes a witch hunter’s tool.
There’s crackpot science and crackpot scientists everywhere. There’s a book titled, “The Madness of Crowds.” Periodically, the culture goes crazy. I think the Covid lockdowns are an example. I think another is the present “trans” insanity. Any national database contains the seeds to feed that madness and I would like the government to have as little information as possible. Not because a national crime database would be an inherently bad thing, but because government has within it a latent, and inherent badness and anything the government knows will, eventually, be a bad thing because the “wrong” hands will use it for their own ends.
When I think of the wrong people, I’m thinking of people like James Comey and the cadre of FBI who worked, apparently exclusively, to destroy Trump’s presidency. I’m thinking of Nancy Pelosi and “The Squad.” I’m thinking there are far more “wrong” people in government than “public servants.”
The price we pay is, a few more people get away with crimes than we’d like. But then, the entire justice system was designed to err on the side of letting the guilty get off, rather than mistakenly punishing the innocent. When I think of the government having more control tools, I look at what they are doing now. They allow riots and looting because they agree with what the rioters and looters are doing. And, now, they’d have even more tools? Not, apparently, to prevent crime...if not, what would they use them for? I shudder to think.
Then we need more infrastructures./s
The number of fatalities while attempting to cross the southwestern desert runs into the hundreds every year. The amount of professional labor that goes into body identification also adds up.
A typical coroner in the US is a very busy person. Many county morgues have backlogs of bodies that are often kept for many weeks waiting for ID and COD.
Yes, it is asking a lot just for body idents.
The states just give up more and more and more powers to the Federal government.
We're at the point where states are just administrative regions. Which is EXACTLY what the communists want, who are trying to take over our country. Who maybe have already succeeded, and are just consolidating their power.
Um, that wasn’t Love Canal. Uranium glass would have been an improvement over what it really was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSVzUTSzwrE
Also, what prompted this law was the fact that more rural jurisdictions were simply not reporting missing persons or unidentified bodies correctly. If at all, in the first case.
Even leaving that out, there have been a surprising number of cases in Texas of police not taking or not filing missing persons reports.
Truthfully, properly used, police only have a very narrow number of tasks for which they are best suited. But they keep having extraneous tasks added to this list, overburdening them with what should be non-police jobs.
Ideally, the public *are* the police, as they were at the founding of the republic. Metropolitan (uniformed) police did not to any great extent exist.
Police are “agents of the courts”, pursuing and apprehending those demanded by the courts, day and night watch, crowd and traffic control, first responders, and armed defenders when the public are overwhelmed with armed criminals.
There’s a few other things, but missing persons search should no be one of them, excepting minors and at risk individuals.
More than 600,000 Americans go missing every year, and though most of these are resolved, some 13,000 stay missing.
“There’s a few other things, but missing persons search should no be one of them, excepting minors and at risk individuals.”
One of the reasons this law was proposed was because those Texas police departments were not taking reports or filing reports for missing minors and those at-risk. They either shrugged it off as ‘good riddance’ or couldn’t be bothered.
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