This is the Fall Line.

Last year, we began an exploration of how databases, created by citizens and not government officials,

are changing both the way the general public accesses and interacts with cold case information.

So far, we've brought you discussions with Todd Matthews, who founded the Donut work, and who was instrumental in the establishment of NEMIS,

the National Missing and Unidentified Person System.

Todd was also one of the earliest, perhaps the earliest, online citizen sleuths, who used the internet to help identify a Jane Doe.

His work helped to identify the decedent formerly known as Tent Girl, as Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor.

We've also interviewed Anita Lucacy of Sovereign Body's Institute.

Anita's set out to do what no government has managed, or even tried to manage, to record the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women girls and two spirit people in North and South America.

We first became aware of Anita Lucacy's work with the Sovereign Body's Institute, when we were trying to find any meaningful statistical information on missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the southeastern United States.

Since her first days working on the database, Sovereign Body's has expanded into not only a system for tracking the missing and murdered, but also a community service organization that serves families affected by the loss of loved ones.

Last year, we also spoke with Thomas Hargrove, the inventor of the algorithm that drives map, the Murder Accountability Project.

We talked about his nonprofit and how he uses data to identify hotspots of violent activity across the United States.

Thomas's algorithm uses law enforcement and FBI data to track murders, who, where, when, and by what method and the clearance rates in metropolitan areas.

Based on the results, he and others in his group can identify troubling patterns that indicate serial killers or other hotspot activity, often before law enforcement has acknowledged or perhaps even noticed the pattern themselves.

We also interviewed our colleagues at the Trans-Dotask Force about their new database, LAMP, which stands for LGBT plus accountability for missing and murdered persons.

It's the very first database of its kind, a way to track the missing and murdered, including unidentified persons or doves in the LGBTQ plus community.

Like sovereign bodies, LAMP is a private database, in this case its purpose twofold, one designed for official access, and also focused on providing friends and chosen family of the missing and murdered a way to give details about their loved ones.

LAMP seeks to correct the errors that so often appear and how LGBTQ plus cases are handled, like misgendering, dead naming, or the failure to include chosen names or out of date physical descriptions that can lower the chances of being killed.

That can lower the chances of locating or identifying a missing person or a decedent.

Today we bring you a database a little different than the others.

If you work in the true crime sphere, we have no doubt that you've used this resource before.

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