US non-profit sues FBI for not reporting native American homicides to the Uniform Crime Report
The brutal murder of Savanna LaFontaine-Greywind, 22, a pregnant Native American in North Dakota in 2017, started a conversation around the crimes that Native American women are vulnerable to. However, it appears that there may have been many more like LaFontaine-Greywind who went unreported.
A non-profit organization has now sued a number of government bodies for failing to "report" native American homicides. The Murder Accountability Project (MAP) has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other federal law enforcement agencies for failing to obey a 31-year-old Congressional mandate that homicides and other major crimes must be reported to the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), the nation's official accounting of major crimes.
This lawsuit grew out of the red hot interest on the question of missing and murdered indigenous girls and women, said Eric W. Witzig, Director of MAP, speaking to MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) exclusively. "This year, seven states created study commissions to investigate whether there are organized efforts to target these women. But the Indian data available to investigate this concern are not present," he said.
In a study conducted by MAP, it was found that homicides committed from 1999 through 2017 on Native Americans were not reported to the UCR or to its related Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). At least 2,400 Indian murders, a staggering number, were not reported.
The FBI and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have jurisdiction to lead criminal investigations on many Indian reservations but failed to report either the occurrence of these crimes or whether they were cleared through the arrest of the offenders, the organization said. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Department of Defense have also failed to report to the Justice Department many thousands of homicides and other major crimes over which they had jurisdiction.
"The American people have the right to know how they are being murdered and whether those murders are being solved," said MAP Chairman Thomas K. Hargrove in a statement. "We reluctantly are suing federal law enforcement agencies under the Freedom of Information Act to compel them to obey a Congressional reporting mandate."
This data plays a crucial role in determining the policy decisions for Native Americans, noted Witzig. "It is simply not possible to make good policy decisions without data to drive them. We seek the data for the public and decision-makers," he said. When asked about the actual homicide rates among Native Americans, MAP was unable to answer - they just did not have information with which to make comparisons. "Because we don’t have the data," he said.
MAP seeks to obtain public data from agencies, data required to be reported through the lawsuit and will give the public access to this data so that appropriate decisions and policies can be made to benefit the community. The lawsuit has been filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, MEAWW can reveal exclusively. The Plaintiffs mentioned have 30 days from the date of service, which is August 15, 2019 to reply to MAP’s lawsuit.