NV: Lawmaker seeks better records on missing and murdered Indigenous people
Assemblywoman Shea Backus (D-Las Vegas) said she’s sponsoring AB125 to ensure Indigenous persons who go missing are included in the National Crime Information Center, a database accessible to federal, state and local law enforcement officials.
Backus said reports give no reliable count on how many Native women go missing annually. Indigenous women are often misclassified as Hispanic or Asian or another racial category in missing people forums, she said.
“Looking at a map of the United States highlighting [these] various MMIW (missing and murdered Indigenous women) cases, I noticed Nevada in a different color … because there was no data,” she said.
When someone goes missing, it’s not necessarily a crime, and Nevada law recognizes that Indian tribes within the state have the power to enact their own laws, regulations and ordinances and enforce them in tribal courts, Backus said. The bill does not allow local or state law enforcement to go onto tribal lands, but instead permits law enforcement to accept a report of an adult who goes missing from an Indian reservation or colony located in Nevada and enter that information into the NCIC.
https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/lawmaker-seeks-better-records-on-missing-and-murdered-indigenous-people
= new reply since forum marked as read
