Attorney General William Barr introduced a $1.5 million initiative to recover missing Native Americans following a rising trend of murders.
Native Americans are disproportionately reported missing compared to other minority groups in the United States. On some reservations, Native American women are 10 times more likely to go missing compared to the national average.
During a visit to Montana, Barr announced the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative to bolster search operations for missing persons and to fix gaps in the Department of Justice databases that are the result of confusing legal jurisdictions with sovereign tribes.
“American Indian and Alaska Native people suffer from unacceptable and disproportionately high levels of violence, which can have lasting impacts on families and communities,” Barr explained. “Too many of these families have experienced the loss of loved ones who went missing or were murdered.”
In Montana, Native American women make up 30% of the missing persons while only being 3.3% of the state’s population. Only 116 of 5,712 cases of missing and murdered indigenous girls were recorded in a Justice Department database in 2016, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute.
Part of the problem in missing persons from Native American reservations is that investigative agencies overlap. The Bureau of Indian Affairs often starts the investigation, which must then be passed onto the FBI, but the jurisdictional agreements often cause delays in the investigations. If missing individuals are found murdered, the crimes often go unsolved.
The $1.5 million investment Barr announced will fund 11 FBI coordinators to close federal reporting gaps and implement a protocol for a more rapid response between jurisdictions when a person is reported missing.
Barr noted that tribal authorities will have direct access to FBI agents specialized in missing persons to help with evidence collection and social media analysis, the current process for which is bogged down by jurisdictional confusion.
