Native women say police ignored rapes

There’s not much that scares Susie. As an Alaska Native woman, she thrives amid subzero winters in her village near the Arctic Circle, and camps with her family each summer at the Bering Sea, catching, drying and smoking salmon to put away for winter.

But Susie is afraid to return to Nome. The man who raped her, she says, is still there.

“Just scares me, and I’m scared to see him, and thinking what he might do,” she says. “But I’m not scared in the village, or any other villages, because I know he won’t come.

“But Nome is like … I don’t really like to overnight in Nome.”

He is a free man —no charges were filed against him. Susie reported to Nome police that she had been assaulted and went with the investigating officer to the hospital, where a forensic nurse was prepared to perform a sexual assault exam.’

Susie’s story isn’t uncommon in Nome, a city of fewer than 4,000 fulltime residents that serves as a regional hub for dozens of smaller villages across western Alaska’s Bering Strait region.

Rape survivors and their supporters told the AP that the city’s police department has often failed to investigate sexual assaults or keep survivors informed about what, if anything, is happening with their cases.

Survivors and advocates contend that Nome police pay less attention and investigate less aggressively when sexual assaults are reported by Alaska Native women. More than half of Nome’s population is Alaska Native, largely of Yupik heritage or — like Susie — of Inupiaq heritage. All of its police department’s sworn officers are nonNative.

Susie’s full name is being withheld by the AP, which has a policy of not identifying victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to be identified.

In 2013 — the year Susie reported she had been sexually assaulted — Nome police received 33 calls about sexual assaults against adults. That year, the department made one arrest on a sexual assault charge. In all, Nome police records show, the department fielded 372 calls about sexual assaults against adults from 2008 through 2017. During that span, 30 cases — 8 percent of the total — led to arrests on sexual assault charges.

By comparison, a study of six police departments across the U.S. published this year by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell found that just under 19 percent of sexual assault reports led to arrests.