City Staff Earn National Award for Work Focused on Missing and Murdered Indigenous People

Dawn Begay, the City of Albuquerque’s Native American Affairs Coordinator and Commander Gerard Bartlett of the Albuquerque Police Department were recognized on Wednesday, January 31 with the national Attorney General’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Community Partnerships for Public Safety for their work coordinating agencies for a massive Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons initiative.

Albuquerque’s Office of Native Affairs is part of the City’s larger Office of Equity and Inclusion OEI, established by Mayor Tim Keller in 2018. The national award, given to Begay and Bartlett in Washington D.C., recognizes contributions to building collaborations to help find missing and murdered indigenous women.

“The FBI was able to start its pilot program in New Mexico because of the groundwork Dawn has done over the past two years to bring 50 jurisdictions together in New Mexico,” said Michelle Melendez, Director of the City’s Office of Equity and Inclusion. “The collaborations fostered by Dawn and her colleagues has helped bring the number of unsolved cases down from more than 500 in 2019 78 in 2023.”

According to the Urban Indian Health Institute, Albuquerque is one of the top five cities experiencing this crisis, and work that the City and our partners are doing is critical to making sure missing and murdered indigenous people are recognized and found.

Also sharing in the award was Albuquerque Police Department Acting Commander Gerard Bartlett. They were joined in accepting the Attorney General’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Community Partnerships for Public Safety with representatives from the New Mexico Field Office of the FBI, Indian Affairs Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and others.