The Juneau Police Department has a new page on its website dedicated to missing persons cases.
The page has photos and descriptions of missing people in Juneau and details about when they were last seen. There are currently 15 people missing in Juneau. Cases span from 1985 to 2020.
All the missing people from last year were found dead. The last person to be found, Clifford White, was found this year on March 15.
Juneau police used to have a missing persons page. JPD’s Public Safety Manager Erann Kalwara said the page went away when the city put all of the department’s websites onto a new system.
For the past few years, Facebook has been the main place where Juneau police have shared information about missing people in Juneau.
Kalwara said it’s harder to share all the necessary information there.
“We just don’t have enough room to give the details of all of them,” Kalwara said. “So we were talking about, should we highlight one of our older cases every month? How do we want to handle that? And we just decided it was best to readjust that webpage that we had.”
Kalwara said Facebook is still the place to get out more urgent information and to try to get the community’s help looking for someone.
The police department is looking for feedback on its new page.
“If family members or people who are familiar with missing persons cases want to provide feedback on ways that they think we can improve, we are absolutely open to that because this is our our first real attempt,” Kalwara said.
Kierstan Farnsworth’s brother went missing last year. She started a Facebook group dedicated to finding missing people in Juneau. She posted a link there to the new JPD missing persons page, and said she is hopeful that it’s a step in the right direction.
Farnsworth hopes radio and phone alerts will happen next.
But Kalwara said she doesn’t know if that will happen. Some other communities around the state use an alert system called Nixle to send alerts on missing people. But right now, Juneau police don’t plan to do that.
