Of the cities evaluated in a recent report, Arizona had the third highest number of cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.
A report from the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) studied 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native females in 2016, and attempted to collect cases involving missing and murdered women of the same demographic in 2017.
Data was collected from a total of 71 cities across the United States, including Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tempe, and Tucson.
Out of the 506 national cases discovered in 2017, 280 were cases of murdered indigenous women and 153 were cases where law enforcement records on the incidents did not exist, according to the report.
Arizona accounted for 54 of the 506 cases in the report, behind Washington and New Mexico. Of Arizona's 54 cases, 31 originated in Tucson.
Take a look at the map below to see how many missing, murdered, and unknown cases were found in each of the cities in this report.
Nine of the cities involved in the study "reported the inability to search for American Indian, Native American, or Alaska Native in their data reporting systems despite the common and expected practice of classifying victims by race in data systems."
The focus of the November 2018 report was to understand why many of these types of incidents are severely under-reported in this demographic.
The Urban Indian Health Institute is a private, non-profit organization whose mission is "to decolonize data, for Indigenous people, by Indigenous people."
Click here to read the full UIHI report on missing and murdered indigenous women.
