Name: Murders of California indigenous women 7 times less likely to be solved, report finds
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Murders of California indigenous women 7 times less likely to be solved, report finds

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A new report has revealed the depth of the widespread lack of scrutiny and reporting surrounding cases of missing and murdered indigenous women in Northern California.The study, carried out by the , a nonprofit, indigenous-led research organization based in Humboldt County, details the alarming lack of data surrounding the cases of 105 women and girls from the Bay Area to the Oregon border using police reports and community-based information.In all, the report documented a total of 2,306 missing Native American women and girls in the U.S., 1,800 of whom were killed or disappeared in the last four decades. The report focuses on Northern California. The most highly concentrated region of cases is the "Lost Coast" — Humboldt, Mendocino, and Del Norte Counties — which is home to over a third of cases in Northern California.The Bay Area made up 16% of cases highlighted in the report of missing or murdered indigenous women that never made national headlines or garnered social media attention.There are more indigenous people in California than any other state in the U.S., with 700,000 Native Americans calling the state home. According to the report, only nine percent of murders of indigenous women in the state have ever been solved, compared to 60% in the greater population, meaning homicides of Native American women in the region are around seven times less likely to be solved than the murders of all other victims.Thirty-one percent of the cases studied involved girls aged 18 and younger, and nearly three-quarters of the cases had victims who were living in the foster care system when they vanished.Some of the problems around collecting data on crimes against indigenous women reportedly include the sharing of jurisdictions with tribes' own police forces, the misclassification of Native American women as white, and the labelling of many deaths as accidental, despite the evidence to contrary, which the study calls a "a chronic and pervasive failure to investigate.”Annita Lucchesi, the executive director of the institute and a Cheyenne descendant, told that there is no reliable data on missing native women in California and that more than half of the cases in the state were not in official missing persons databases.“Women after women, disappearing,” Lucchesi said,&nbsp;“It creates a sense of hopelessness. It makes it feel like this is a world that we can’t live in anymore.”One example of misclassification in the report reveals evidence of a homicide labelled as a car accident in 1991.Alicia Lara, a Tarahumara woman, was found dead in her vehicle in Weitchpec, Humboldt County in 1991. When her daughter, Christina Lastra, pushed the coroner’s office for more information on her death, she was told her that her mother’s death showed evidence that it was actually a homicide — the body was badly beaten and found in the passenger seat of the vehicle, the report said.There was no explanation as to why her death was not classified as a homicide and nearly 30 years later Lastra told the authors of the report, "I would like to know why the Humboldt County officials didn’t do anything and why they felt compelled to tell me and my brother that she had died in a car accident. [The coroner] seemed like such a nice man, but to me ... he was probably trying to protect me, but that’s not honoring my mother and that’s not honoring his own oath or society by any means, to allow a murderer to not be held accountable."Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal told CalMatters that the case report for Lastra’s mother didn’t strike him as particularly suspicious, but that he did have trouble understanding how Lara had gotten in the passenger seat. An investigation into the case was never opened.“We’re learning from past mistakes, trying not to repeat that in the future,” Honsal said.Find the full Sovereign Bodies InstituteAndrew Chamings is an editor at SFGATE. Email: Andrew.Chamings@sfgate.com | Twitter: @AndrewChamings

A new report has revealed the depth of the widespread lack of scrutiny and reporting surrounding cases of missing and murdered indigenous women in Northern California.The study, carried out by the , a nonprofit, indigenous-led research organization based in Humboldt County, details the alarming lack of data surrounding the cases of 105 women and girls from the Bay Area to the Oregon border using police reports and community-based information.In all, the report documented a total of 2,306 missing Native American women and girls in the U.S., 1,800 of whom were killed or disappeared in the...

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Andrew Chamings

AndrewChamings

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Murders of California indigenous women 7 times less likely to be solved, report finds

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