ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- The U.S. Justice Department will double the funding it gives tribes for public-safety programs and crime victims as it tries to tackle the high rates of violence against American Indian women, a top official said.
The department's third-highest-ranking official said more than $113 million in public-safety funding will be doled out to 133 tribes and Alaska Native villages to try to address the issue.
An additional $133 million will be awarded in the coming weeks to tribes to help American Indian crime victims, Jesse Panuccio, principal deputy associate attorney general, announced Wednesday in Santa Fe.
The announcement comes after a series of stories by The Associated Press helped put an increased focus on the deaths and disappearances of American Indian women and girls. Panuccio noted that tribal leaders have called for more robust investigations into those cases and human trafficking.
"We recognize the serious nature of the problem we're facing, and we are trying, through a variety of strategies -- both through the funding and the use of our own prosecutors and building up awareness -- to address these issues," Panuccio said.
For decades, tribes largely had been unable to directly access money in a U.S. program aimed at supporting crime victims nationwide -- even as federal figures showed more than half of Indian women faced sexual or domestic violence at some point in their lives. On some reservations, women are killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average.
Figures at the end of 2017 showed a disproportionate number of American Indian women listed as missing. Based on figures obtained from an FBI database, The Associated Press found this month 633 open missing-person cases for American Indian women, who make up 0.4 percent of the U.S. population but 0.7 percent of cases overall.
Black women were the only other group to be overrepresented in the caseload compared with their proportion of the population.
The Justice Department funding increase follows years of congressional efforts to fix a system that many say has left American Indian women vulnerable to violent crime.
A Section on 09/20/2018