Seventy-five people who were anonymously buried in a potter’s field up to 24 years ago have finally been identified — but their families still don’t know it.
Under a joint program launched 18 months ago, the city Medical Examiner’s Office and the NYPD have used enhanced fingerprint, DNA and dental technology to identify 81 people buried on Hart Island as far back as 1990.
But they’re under fire for tracking down the families of only six.
“It’s an embarrassment,’’ said Charles Eric-Gordon, an investigative lawyer who helps locate relatives of deceased people.
“They’re not showing anything approaching due diligence,’’ he said of the ME and NYPD. “They’re not using the resources available for them, including public records and government files.’’
But officials with both agencies insisted they’ve done everything they can to locate the other families, given their resources and manpower.
“The work can be challenging, but the task force will continue its efforts on behalf of lost and missing individuals, and their next of kin,’’ the departments said in a joint e-mail to The Post.
Privately, however, each side blamed the other for any delays in notification.
Police sources said the ME’s Office is ultimately responsible for identifying dead people and notifying their relatives, while ME sources suggested that the NYPD has traditionally been the lead agency in making death notifications.
The Post asked the ME’s Office for the names of the 75 people who have been identified but whose families still haven’t been notified, in hopes of publicizing their cases and helping to solve the problem.
“We just can’t release those names due to the policy of first needing to notify next of kin,” an official with the ME’s Office replied.
When asked about the six cases in which families were notified, the official said the agency still wouldn’t release the names.
One frustrated ME source suggested that his office wasn’t working as hard as it should be on notifications because the dead were likely on the fringes of society.
“This is a very serious matter, but these people are indigent, and the feeling was that nobody would really care’’ anyway, the source said.
ME spokeswoman Julie Bolcer, who said the first positive identification was made in December 2012, vehemently denied the claim.
Liesa Healy-Miller, a forensic genealogist who tracks down people for probate and adoption cases, agreed with Eric-Gordon that more could be done to notify families, saying it’s a nationwide problem.
“I believe that government can be doing far more to reunite unclaimed remains with their loved ones,’’ she said.
But, she noted, it’s not all an ME’s fault.
“Medical examiners certainly don’t have the time or budget to deal with this,” she said, “and it’s not their area of expertise.”
Both the ME’s Office and the NYPD insisted in their statement that they were using “the identification and investigative resources of both agencies’’ to make proper notifications.