An Alaska Native group seeking the names of Indigenous people murdered in the state ran into a roadblock this summer when the Alaska Department of Public Safety rejected their request.
The nonprofit Data for Indigenous Justice had been trying to assemble the names to read them at a rally for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. But when state officials said they weren't able to provide the information, as the group told the Anchorage Daily News, it revealed a problem, that the state wasn't actually keeping track.
That's despite statements in recent years by Alaska's public officials, including the governor, that law enforcement were working to address disproportionately high rates of violence against Native people.
Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reporter Kyle Hopkins recently wrote about the rejected records request. Hopkins says Data for Indigenous Justice had a simple question: How do you solve a problem if you can't describe the basic elements of that problem?
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Kyle Hopkins: You can't come up with solutions without knowing the scope and the depth of the problem, just the basic building blocks. And so, in 2021, this group (Data for Indigenous Justice) says, "Look, there's a lack of information," but they come out, they come out with their own MMIP list. And then, what they were doing just recently, over the summer, was they went to the Alaska State Troopers and said, "Can you please provide us a list of names of all the people who were victims in the homicide cases that you've investigated over the past three years, and also tell us which of those victims were Alaska Native?" And the intent there was to shore up and kind of buttress their own MMIP database.
And I think the assumption was that, years after there had been this acknowledgement, and really this admission from the state of Alaska, you know, the governor appointed an MMIP task force that cited this nonprofit's findings, you know, kind of admitted, "Look, we're missing this data. This is a problem." You know, years after that happened, I think there was this assumption that, well, certainly now the state troopers, the state of Alaska, must be keeping track. But when this nonprofit made that request, which was, you know, it's like a two-sentence request, the state said, "No, we're not keeping track of that. And we're not going to, we're, basically, we're not going to do that for you. We're not going to spend the time to do that for you."
Casey Grove: I might ask this kind of callous question, I guess, but why does it matter to have the names themselves?
KH: Well, I think what we heard from Data for Indigenous Justice, when they, you know, were telling us about the state's response, or kind of the rejection of this records request, the response was that it appeared that, you know, there's a difference between doing things to say that you've done them and being performative and saying, "Look, we've created a task force. Look, we're putting out press releases about this issue." That's different than taking the the necessary steps to actually solve that problem.
And so the response, and I wouldn't want to speak for this nonprofit, but what they said in interviews was that the refusal to spend just, really, I mean literally, like two hours to come up with these names, the refusal to do that research, to them, was a sign that the state was more interested in being performative, rather than actually, kind of addressing the topic.
But I think from a really simple, commonsense point of view, you know, if your priority is to solve the problem of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, you know, what is the one data point that you'd start with? How many people are there? What are their names? And the state is saying, "We don't know, and we're not gonna bother to spend two or three hours to look through some paperwork to provide that list."
And so it just begs the question, well, why not? Then, you know, what's the point of any of this? If you don't have the, you know, just the basic Lego bricks that you need to kind of understand the issue?
CG: Can you characterize what the problem is that we've got this acronym for, MMIP, Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, like as it pertains to just knowing that these cases have happened? I mean, in your reporting, it seems like you've identified this problem of just that there hasn't been as much of a spotlight shown on these type of cases. Would you say that?
KH: Yeah. I think you've had this awareness over the past 10 years — and I think Canada, like the Yukon, I think is probably a decade ahead of us on having this conversation and identifying these gaps in knowledge, you know, and and holding institutions accountable. And, you know, I think media, I think we're accountable. I, as a reporter, I'm accountable — I think there's been this recognition over the past decade that, you know, a person goes missing, they go missing from a village or from Anchorage, or they're murdered and their body is found, and their death is assumed to be a suicide, or it's undetermined, and maybe there's not the kind of effort to figure out what really happened that there would be in other cases.
And then they go missing in the media, which is our, we're culpable for that, at least I am, personally. And then they go missing in statistics, which is what's happening now, where the most basic building block of data — just how many people are we talking about? — is unavailable. And that's a choice. It's a choice the state is making. I mean, they could provide it.
CG: So what did the state say when you went to them with these questions?
KH: You know, I don't get answers directly from the governor anymore, although I do give questions to the governor. I, like hand-walked a list of questions to the governor's office and delivered those. I got no response to that, to those questions, from the governor. And I think it's it's fair to ask him these questions, because he's the one who is putting his name on press releases saying that he's kind of working with Indigenous groups to address this issue.
And then when it comes to his Department of Public Safety, they didn't answer questions such as, "Why isn't your records software capable of doing this? Why not spend the time to do it?" Their response was, "Look, we've done X, Y and Z already." They said, "We have a list of missing persons that we put out." What they said was it's absurd for us to say that, to imply, that they're not making enough of an effort, because they had rejected this request from an advocacy group. So that was their response.
As you know, it's not really supposed to matter who makes the request. So there's, I think, there's a hint of acknowledgement within their response that the decision to give that those records or not is potentially based on who's asking, and that's not how public records law works.
