{"id":40826,"date":"2022-05-02T19:11:38","date_gmt":"2022-05-03T01:11:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/proposed-office-to-combat-crime-against-indigenous-people-raises-objections-from-polis-administration\/"},"modified":"2022-05-03T01:11:38","modified_gmt":"2022-05-03T01:11:38","slug":"proposed-office-to-combat-crime-against-indigenous-people-raises-objections-from-polis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/proposed-office-to-combat-crime-against-indigenous-people-raises-objections-from-polis\/","title":{"rendered":"Proposed office to combat crime against Indigenous people raises objections from Polis administration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Jeannie
Jeannie Hovland, deputy assistant secretary for Native American Affairs for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, poses with a Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women mask, in Anchorage, Alaska. (Mark Thiessen\/Associated Press file)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Gov. Jared Polis\u2019 administration has requested changes to a bill meant to help solve the disappearances and murders of Indigenous people in Colorado.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not going over well with the sponsors and some of the community members behind the effort, who may try to force the governor\u2019s hand by passing the bill anyway.<\/p>\n

Indigenous people suffer violent crime at higher rates than the general population, an issue sometimes referred to as MMIR \u2013 \u201cmissing and murdered Indigenous relatives.\u201d (Many groups also refer to MMIW, \u201cmissing and murdered Indigenous women.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The bill, Senate Bill 22-150<\/a>, proposed the creation of a new state office to help coordinate investigations of individual cases and to fight the problem of disappearances more broadly.<\/p>\n

In a letter to the sponsors, the Polis administration said it supports the goal but questions the method. Instead of creating a new state office with five employees, the administration wants to set up a mostly volunteer task force while also assigning four agents from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to specifically work on MMIR issues.<\/p>\n

State Sen. Jessie Danielson<\/a>, a Democratic sponsor, said Colorado needs a dedicated office to tackle these crimes because they often cross jurisdictional and cultural borders, allowing cases to fall through the cracks. She\u2019s been working on the bill for more than a year and said the Indigenous people she\u2019s working with feel the same way.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most important thing is that the governor remembers that this bill came to us from the community,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was their idea on how to solve this problem, the violence that they have to endure, and they understand how we should be solving it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raven Payment, a member of a grassroots MMIR effort in the state, said the state needs to show it\u2019s committed to this effort to win the trust of Indigenous communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving this office \u2026 means that they have a person or persons that they can go to, that they trust is going to do the right thing on their behalf,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports<\/a> Indigenous women are nearly three times more likely than white women to be killed in a homicide. Black women died by homicide at similarly high rates.<\/p>\n

Crimes against Indigenous people can take an extraordinarily long time to solve, advocates said, because of insufficient law enforcement, a lack of media attention, and complicated issues of federal, local and tribal police jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

Concerns about scope of state effort<\/div>\n

As drafted, the bill is expected to cost the state about $570,000 a year, including the salaries for a five-person office. Those positions could include a director, a data analyst, an administrative assistant, criminal investigator and a training specialist. The director would have to be \u201cclosely connected\u201d to a tribe or Indigenous community.<\/p>\n

But the Polis administration thinks the state isn\u2019t ready to support a new office.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe language in the bill creates a broad scope of work, with expectations that are beyond the mission and skill set of the Department of Public Safety,\u201d spokesman Conor Cahill wrote in an email.<\/p>\n

Instead, the administration suggested that the CBI create a team of agents to coordinate investigations and create best practices, and try to recruit Indigenous employees to work on it.<\/p>\n

The administration also proposed creating a task force within the Colorado Commission on Indian Affairs to tackle policy issues related to MMIR. As proposed, the task force would meet two to four times a year and have one paid staff member, plus more than a dozen members from government agencies, Indigenous communities and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

In total, the Polis administration would dedicate the same number of employees \u2013 five \u2013 but in a different form than the original bill.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have proposed an alternative approach that would have the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs (CCIA) lead a robust process across state agencies, in partnership with American Indian\/Alaska Native communities, to examine the wider issues that contribute to MMIR and to develop a set of recommendations for how the State can most successfully bring justice and provide supports to MMIR and their families. By doing this we can center and elevate Native American voices more effectively,\u201d Cahill said.<\/p>\n

The original bill also calls for a system that could alert Indigenous communities to disappearances and endangered people. The governor\u2019s administration suggested, instead, that the state could modify the existing Missing and Endangered Alert System.<\/p>\n

Polis proposal rejected<\/div>\n

Some of the bill\u2019s sponsors say the administration\u2019s requests go too far, and they\u2019re willing to risk a veto to stick with their original vision.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems to me that they\u2019re keen to create offices, they just don\u2019t want to create this one,\u201d Danielson said, referring to the fact Polis has spearheaded the establishment of numerous new offices, including the Office of Saving People Money on Health Care<\/a>, the Office of the Future of Work<\/a> and the Office of Early Childhood Education<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Danielson supports the administration\u2019s proposal to dedicate CBI agents to the cause, but she objects to the idea that an unpaid group is the right way to take on the bigger policy questions. That\u2019s better handled with a permanent, paid office, she said.<\/p>\n

Danielson and state Rep. Monica Duran<\/a>, a Democrat, said they would not accept the administration\u2019s changes. Instead, they will attempt to get their version of the bill through the Legislature. Doing so would essentially challenge the governor to veto the bill.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the right thing to do,\u201d Duran said. \u201cWhat we\u2019re fighting for, what we\u2019re trying to establish here is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, another sponsor, Democratic Rep. Leslie Herod said in a text she was \u201cconfident that we will find common ground\u201d on the right approach.<\/p>\n

Payment wants to see the original bill passed, too. Advocates have maintained a list of more than 50 disappearances and deaths, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe system hasn\u2019t done right by them,\u201d Payment said. \u201cAnd so as we have these conversations, you know, their stories and their names are always etched in the back of my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill also would require the CBI to maintain a database on missing Indigenous people from Colorado, with a public-facing website. And the board that oversees the state\u2019s law-enforcement training and standards \u2013 the POST Board \u2013 would develop training for officers in best practices for investigating the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people.<\/p>\n

The governor\u2019s administration has not objected to those provisions.<\/p>\n

Last year, Minnesota authorized what it described as the nation\u2019s first Office of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Governor wants a mostly volunteer task force with four assigned CBI agents<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[394,15,168,819,28,1097,1130],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-40826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado-legislature","tag-colorado-state-senate","tag-crime","tag-gov-jared-polis","tag-headlines","tag-indigenous-people","tag-missing-person"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40826"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=40826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}