Not long ago, a young woman went missing in a Twin Cities Metro Area community. She’s home now so we’re going to protect her identity as she moves forward with her life.

At the time, the local law enforcement agency issued a statewide Endangered Missing Person Alert and our Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) posted information about her on social media. 

That’s when Minnesotans kicked into action. People who knew the missing woman — and hundreds of people who never met her — shared the information and word spread like wildfire. Pretty soon tips and leads starting coming in that helped law enforcement develop a timeline of her disappearance, and learn about places she would frequent and recent sightings by the public. Within hours, she had been found safe and was back home again.

When we talk about social media here at the Department of Public Safety, we talk about the power of the share. Rarely are social media shares more powerful than when they can help bring an endangered Minnesotan home safe.

That’s why we’ve launched a new Facebook page dedicated to getting the word out about missing people. The BCA’s Minnesota Alerts: Missing and Endangered page is focused solely on getting information to you about missing people in the hopes that you’ll join in the effort to find them.

Minnesota Alerts: Missing and Endangered — What you can expect

Our BCA posts information on the Minnesota Alerts Facebook page immediately after the local agency issues a statewide missing person alert. The local agency decides when issuing an alert will help their ongoing investigation.

We include all of the descriptive information that we have along with any images. Sometimes the photos aren’t great, but our focus is on getting information out fast. If better images become available, we’ll add them. We’ll also post updates from the investigating agency as we receive them.

The information remains posted until the local agency cancels the alert. In cases where the person is found deceased it can take a few days while law enforcement notifies family members or awaits confirmation from a medical examiner. After that we remove all identifying information and images and provide a final status update on our page.

What we need from you

We hope you’ll read through every post about missing people and keep an eye out for them when you’re out and about. We also hope you’ll join with other force multipliers by sharing the post with your own Facebook friends. We have more than 100,000 followers but we regularly see missing person posts with well over a million views. That is because of you.

If you scroll through our page, you’ll see how many of the alerts are listed as canceled. Each one is a success story — for the missing person, for their family and loved ones who were so worried, and for all of you who stepped up when we needed you.

We all share the same goal: working together to bring every missing Minnesotan home safe. We are grateful for your partnership in this effort. We hope you’ll follow our page. Here are a few additional resources.

• Learn more about missing person alerts.
• Learn about steps to take when your loved one goes missing.
• Sign up to receive alerts.