Native tribes to get more funding to address public safety

The Trump administration is doubling the funding the U.S. Justice Department gives tribes for public safety programs and crime victims. The effort will to tackle head-0n, the high rates of violence against Native American women, a top official said. It will be the highest funding that any administration in recent history has provided to Native American tribes.

A Justice Department’s said more than $113 million in public safety funding will be provided 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 Native American crime victims, Jesse Panuccio, principal deputy associate attorney general, announced Wednesday in Santa Fe.

The announcement comes after increased focus on the issues has helped highlight the deaths and disappearances of Native American 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 Native American women faced sexual or domestic violence at some point in their lives. On some reservations, Native American women are killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

Figures at the end of 2017 showed a disproportionate number of Native women listed as missing. Based on figures obtained from an FBI database, this month 633 open missing person cases for Native American women, who make up 0.4 percent of the U.S. population but 0.7 percent of cases overall.

African-American women were the only other group to be overrepresented in the caseload compared with their proportion of the population.

The Trump administration funding increase follows years of congressional efforts to fix a system that many say has left Native American women especially vulnerable to violent crime.

Legal experts and victims’ advocates blame underfunded police departments that lack the resources to investigate crimes and lingering jurisdictional gaps among federal, tribal and local law enforcement agencies that often result in cases going unprosecuted.

A series of congressional proposals are trying address how authorities’ handle and track reports of missing women on reservations.

Juana Majel-Dixon, co-chairwoman of a National Congress of American Indians’ taskforce established to address violence against women, welcomes the increase in funding that she and others spent years advocating for but which fell on deaf ears under the Obama and Bush administration.

“When you think about the enormity of (the number of) victims we’re talking about, the money being provided has been graciously received,” she said. “But it’s not enough.”

While President Trump did not see huge numbers of Native support for his campaign he did make huge inroads into the community.  He was endorsed by the Native American Coalition which is made up of members who hail from tribal organizations in 15 states and include both grass-roots leaders and elected officials. Trumps support among Native Americans has risen with improved job prospects and other policies seen as addressing their concerns.