The Seattle Indian Health Board is severing ties with the Seattle Police Department, saying its recommendations to improve how law enforcement handles and tracks cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people were repeatedly rejected.
The health board signed a five-year contract with the police department in January 2021, just over a year after the Seattle City Council directed the city to work with the organization to improve data collection methods and provide training on how police officers should interact with Native communities.
It was the first such agreement signed in the country between a local law enforcement agency and an Indigenous-led organization to address the nationwide crisis of violence and disappearances among Native people, said Abigail Echo-Hawk, the health board’s executive vice president. In recent years, federal, state and tribal agencies have begun increasing efforts to refine data collection techniques, improve missing person alerts and investigate cold cases involving Indigenous people.
In a letter sent to Police Chief Sue Rahr on Monday, Echo-Hawk said her organization was ending its $87,500-per-year contract effective immediately and would not bill the city for any work conducted this year or last year “as we were unable to reach our goal of data changes and trainings.”
“I’m tired of sitting on committees while people die,” Echo-Hawk said in an interview. “We’re going to work with entities that want to change, and I hope SPD will eventually be an organization that wants to meaningfully help.”
In an emailed statement, Seattle Police Department’s Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey said that while the department has attempted to meaningfully engage with the Seattle Indian Health Board for several years, the two agencies struggled to collaborate.
“The department concurs that this contract should end given the required schedule of planning and deliverables that has not been met by UIHI,” Maxey said, referring to the Urban Indian Health Institute, the research arm of the health board. Maxey also listed project manager turnover and a “host of missed engagements” as reasons the contract should end.
In response, Echo-Hawk said that while it’s common for organizations to experience turnover and reschedule meetings due to shifting priorities, that doesn’t explain the pushback they’ve received from the police department to adopt new practices that would better serve Native communities.
“SPD is trying to deflect attention from their failure to protect our community and their inability to meet the outcomes of Seattle City Council’s resolution,” Echo-Hawk said.
Using materials gathered during their contract with the Seattle Police Department, the Seattle Indian Health Board plans to release a report on recommendations to law enforcement agencies this week on how to create appropriate websites for reporting, investigating and creating awareness on missing and murdered Indigenous people, Echo-Hawk said.
The 2019 city resolution that led to the contract came after the Urban Indian Health Institute published a watershed report in 2018 that identified 506 cases of missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls since 1943 across the United States. Researchers listed 45 cases in Seattle, the most of any city studied, but noted the figures were likely an undercount.
Under the resolution, the city would create a “culturally attuned police liaison position” who would help build trust between Native communities and the Seattle Police Department. The city later approved $161,000 for a new strategic adviser within the police department focused on best practices for data reporting, collection and management of cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
Since their contract began, the Seattle Indian Health Board has faced “continuous pushback” on specific recommendations to improve Indigenous data collection, most notably on tracking the tribal affiliation of missing and murdered individuals and sharing that information with tribes, Echo-Hawk said.
Maxey said patrol officers collect race and ethnicity data for victims, including whether an individual is Indigenous, and may note in reports if a person is a member of a tribal community if it’s relevant to the investigation.
But consistently collecting and disseminating more granular data on tribal affiliation poses several challenges, he said, such as restrictions imposed by the city’s privacy policy and state laws. In some cases, victims would not want sensitive information shared with tribes.
The department aims to reserve explicit data entry “only to what is necessary for law enforcement purposes and reporting requirements,” Macey said. Trying to get patrol officers to ask people about their tribal affiliations, which they are not legally required to answer, and document responses systemically is “not a reliable mechanism to gather that information,” he added.
Echo-Hawk strongly rejects the police department’s legal interpretation of city and state laws, and its position that recording tribal affiliation data isn’t necessary for law enforcement operations. She said the department’s position runs contrary to the goals of the city’s 2019 resolution and contributes to the ongoing issue of violence against Indigenous people going underreported.
Collecting and using tribal affiliation information might help law enforcement find more leads during investigations, or identify crime trends such as whether Native women from a specific tribe are being targeted by human traffickers, she said.
“If you eliminate us through the data, then we do not have data to advocate with,” said Echo-Hawk, who is an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. “Without the data, the resources are not being allocated.”
Native American advocates and experts have long sounded the alarm on the disproportionate rates of violence, sexual assault, homicides and disappearances Indigenous people — especially girls and women — face. The true scope of the crisis is obscured by victims often being racially misclassified by law enforcement, Echo-Hawk said, or hesitating to report crimes to police.
The statistics that do exist around missing and murdered Indigenous people are bleak. Indigenous people represent about 2% of the state’s population but 7% of missing women. As of April, more than 120 Native American people are missing in Washington, according to the State Patrol, including eight under Seattle Police Department’s jurisdiction.
About 5% of recorded unsolved homicides, or at least 113 unsolved homicide cases, involve Indigenous victims, according to a 2022 review by the state Attorney General’s Office. The office noted the disparity is likely “much more significant,” since many cases involving Indigenous victims may be inaccurately reported, or not reported at all.
The Seattle Indian Health Board’s 2018 report found about 8% of the 506 cases involving missing and murdered Indigenous women resulted in a perpetrator being convicted.
Seeing that statistic in particular was “a punch in the gut,” said Aubony Burns, senior deputy prosecuting attorney at King County and an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
At the time, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office had an internal data team that was already interested in exploring how it could better track cases involving Native Americans. After reading the report, Burns contacted Echo-Hawk to invite her organization to run training sessions and offer suggestions for data collection.
Since then, the prosecutor’s office staff have received training on the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people, the history of the federal government’s interactions with tribes that have contributed to mistrust, and how to handle cases with cultural competency.
The training was not part of or funded by the city’s contract with the health board, Burns said, but has resulted in county prosecutors and Seattle detectives handling cases involving Native people with greater care and sensitivity.
The office also has updated its case management software to denote tribal affiliation when it’s noted in police reports or civil protection orders. Burns said the office won’t be able to track tribal affiliation data unless police officers collect it, but is hopeful local law enforcement agencies will soon do so more consistently.
“Our data is only as good as the police’s data,” Burns said. “But we wanted to take the initiative to build our capacity … to track that data should we get that data.”
In recent years, the state and federal government have increased resources toward addressing the crisis of Indigenous people who experience violence or go missing, with President Joe Biden signing an executive order in 2021 to protect the well-being of Native Americans and bring justice to families affected by violence.
That order came after federal lawmakers passed Savanna’s Act in 2020, which aimed to increase data collection in cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people and improve cooperation among local, tribal and federal agencies. Under the law, the U.S. Department of Justice must provide training to law enforcement agencies on how to record tribal enrollment for victims in federal databases.
Washington launched the first alert system for missing Indigenous people in the nation in 2022, and created a cold case unit for missing and murdered Indigenous people in 2023. Last year, the U.S. Justice Department launched its own outreach program to investigate unsolved cases in five regions, including Washington and Oregon.
This increased coordination and commitment of resources among federal, state and tribal governments since the contract began “also vitiates to a large extent the purpose of this contract,” Maxey said in a statement.
The rollout of some changes at police departments and sheriff’s offices across the country has been slow. Despite federal grants trickling down to local agencies and tribes, a 2021 Government Accountability Office report found the Department of Justice struggled to meet all the Savanna’s Act’s requirements.
“We’re losing young girls, we’re losing women. We’re having sisters and aunties and cousins going missing at a higher rate than white people,” Burns said. “This is a public health crisis affecting the care, health and livelihood of a whole people.”
