Tribes to get more money to fight crimes vs. women

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The U.S. Justice Department will double the money it gives tribes for public safety programs and crime victims as it tries to tackle the high rates of violence against Native American women, a top official said.

The department’s third-highest ranking official said more than $113 million in public safety funding will be given to 133 tribes and Alaska Native villages.

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.

“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.

Based on figures obtained from an FBI database, The Associated Press found this month 633 open missing person cases for Native American women.

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