U.S. attorney general vows continued support to address rural Alaska public safety

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who came to Alaska to better understand public safety problems in rural and mostly Indigenous areas, got a taste of those challenges on Tuesday when weather interfered with his tour schedule.

He and his travel companions were unable to make a scheduled flight from Galena, a Koyukon village on the Yukon River, to Huslia, another Koyukon village located about 170 river miles away on the Koyukuk River. So the group improvised, staying put in Galena and talking to Huslia residents who had arrived there.

The logistical snafu made an impression “in ways that just reading about it would not have,” Garland said at a meeting in Anchorage on Tuesday with Native representatives.

“We had a United States Marshals plane. We had a United States Air Force plane. And still, with the weather, we weren’t able to get there,” Garland said. He now sees how difficult it can be to respond to emergencies, he said. “If the attorney general of the United States can’t get there, I can’t imagine law enforcement or medical could get there without enormous delay of time, and that’s just really not acceptable.”

At Tuesday’s event in Anchorage, which followed a meeting on Monday with staffers at the U.S. attorney’s office, Garland gave a brief update of the department’s rural Alaska work.

The department’s Office for Victims of Crime is awarding almost $70 million for services to tribal groups across the nation, including 67 tribal communities in Alaska, he said. The Alaska funding in that package totals $22 million, according to the department.

The Justice Department is also working to carry out an Alaska-specific provision of the Violence Against Women Act, which was reauthorized in 2022, he said. That provision created a pilot program giving Alaska tribes some law-enforcement jurisdiction over non-Native offenders. The department is developing a framework for funding and technical assistance, recently shared at a conference in Tulsa, Garland said. Earlier this month, the department announced a grant through the program to the Alaska Native Justice Center, which will work with other Alaska organizations, he said.

“We are excited to be able to draw on the expertise of Alaska-based organizations to help Alaska Native communities build the capacity of their own justice systems,” he said.

Work also continues to address the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, Garland said. As part of that work, the department has established a Missing or Murdered Indigenous Personal Regional Outreach Program, he said. That program, launched in June, puts 10 attorneys and coordinators in five regions across the nation to aid in prevention and response.

In many ways, Garland and the Justice Department are continuing the work of Garland’s Trump administration predecessor, William Barr. Barr came to Alaska in 2019 to learn about the lack of law enforcement and public safety in rural Alaska. He visited Bethel, the hub community in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and the outlying Yup’ik village of Napaskiak, as well as Galena and Anchorage. He wound up issuing emergency funding and other support to help pay, equip and train village public safety officers and to provide other services.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who had invited Garland to Alaska and who traveled with him to Galena and sat next to him at the Anchorage meeting table, said the continuity is appreciated.

“I wanted to make sure that we have the same commitment across administrations to support tribal self-determination as a solution to local public safety and injustice needs,” she said at the opening of the event.

In a related development, the Alaska Department of Public Safety and Anchorage Police Department on Tuesday issued what they characterized as a first-of-its-kind Missing Indigenous Persons Report that holds data on all relevant reported cases in the Alaska Public Safety Information Network.