Special Agent Describes Work in North Dakota for Operation Not Forgotten

Special Agent Amanda Risner describes her 30-day deployment to North Dakota in support of Operation Not Forgotten, a four-month surge of FBI resources to Indian country to help investigate crimes against Tribal women and children.


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Slide: Joint law enforcement response to arson crime scene in North Dakota

My name is Amanda Risner. I am an agent out of the Atlanta Division. I applied to come up and help out in Operation Not Forgotten. It was something that I kind of had always really wanted to do—see what Indian country is like. And when I saw the opportunity, I just jumped at it.

Slide: In Operation Not Forgotten, the FBI detailed special agents to remote offices to help work cases involving violent crimes against Native American women and children.

I'm pretty much assisting the agents here in Minot [ND]. My goal was to be able to help them on any cases that they needed assistance on. They have a very high caseload, so anything I can do to kind of move cases quicker or take things off their plates.

I've gotten to know the agents here very well. They have to do a lot with very little.

Back home, I mean, we're in the city and we're in the counties that we're working in. Here, you get a call-out and you might be driving in two-plus hours. In the winter you're doing that. If there's a snowstorm, you still have to come out. If it's a torrential downpour, you're coming out. So I think what's different here is you're pretty much working with very limited resources to do very big things.

So you might have a whole entire crime scene that you have to work with, but you might have one or two people. So it's just whatever you've got in your truck and whoever's next to you ,and hopefully getting what you need to get. So that way you can get a conviction or get justice at the end of the day.

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