When 14-year-old Leanne went missing, police labelled her a runaway. Her family say it's because she is Native American

When 14-year-old Leanne went missing, police labelled her a runaway. Her family say it's because she is Native American

Briefly

"Alan Artale, stepfather to Leanne Marie Hausberg, a 14-year-old biracial Native American girl, did what every American is told to do when their child goes missing. He immediately reported Hausberg's disappearance to the New York City police department. But 26 years later, speaking at the family's neighbourhood park in Brooklyn, New York, he says their response at the time felt dismissive."

"Instead of classifying Hausberg as a missing person, the NYPD labelled her a runaway a tag that stuck for years until her case was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) in 2010. Until earlier this year, her race in NamUs data was classified as Caucasian a phenomenon all too common for missing Native American people, frequently mislabelled as white or Hispanic. Hausberg remains missing to this day."

"The experience of Hausberg's family reflects a nationwide pattern of erasure and dismissal of urban cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people (MMIP), say campaigners, which disproportionately affects girls and women. Mak Mars, who runs the Justice for Native People blog one of the only publicly accessible MMIP databases in the country says that missing Native Americans are disproportionately labelled runaways compared with non-Native counterparts."