By Penny Kmitt, WBZ-TV News
BOSTON – National Missing Persons Day will be observed this Saturday, February 3, and an organization in Boston is using the occasion to highlight some of the unsolved cases in Massachusetts.
Mics for the Missing is giving a voice to the voiceless to spread awareness for missing Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC).
“It is our collective responsibility to save our children,” co-founder Mayowa Osinubi told WBZ-TV.
“Every year we see that BIPOC folks are overrepresented in the numbers of missing persons, yet they are still very much under-supported and under-reported,” she said. “The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) did a compilation of all their data and found almost 40% of all missing children are Black. So this is the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable.”
According to NCMEC’s recent data , 38% of AMBER alerts issued in 2019 involved children who were Black. Currently, the center shows at least 4,470 children are missing across America.