Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence

U.S. Attorney General William Barr declared a law enforcement emergency in Alaska on June 28. The announcement follows a visit to the state where he saw firsthand how many rural communities have little-to-no public safety presence.

The Justice Department pledged $10.5 million in immediate funds to support law enforcement in Alaska Native communities. The Justice Department says that $6 million are immediately available to help hire and train village public safety officers as well as tribal and village police officers. The department plans to award $4.5 million for 20 officer positions for Alaska Native grantees by the end of July.

Justice Department official Katharine Sullivan says that the funds are part of a longer-term vision.

“We have this sort of immediate response based on the AG’s visit,” Sullivan explained. “We’re going to have a sort of medium-length response to keep things going, and a long-term plan for sustainability. That’s our goal.”

Other federal agencies, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, will submit plans within 30 days to address Alaska rural justice. In separate funding, Children’s Advocacy Centers in rural hub towns like Bethel, as well as in Native American communities in the Lower 48, will receive $14 million in support.

The Department of Justice also laid out additional plans for funding opportunities. Sullivan said that the department wants to put a local public safety official in every rural Alaskan community.

The declaration won praise from the Alaska Federation of Natives and the Association of Village Council Presidents. AVCP CEO Vivian Korthuis called the plan “unprecedented.”

“We’ve been busy organizing a Public Safety Facility Assessment, Public Safety Summit, Statewide VPSO Strategic Plan, and creating a Public Safety Task Force. All of these efforts allowed us to lead with solutions, solutions designed to fit our unique needs,” Korthuis said in a statement.

Barr visited Napaskiak on his Alaska trip, and Napaskiak Tribal Administrator Sharon Williams is celebrating the news.

“I’m very happy. I was close to tears this morning when I heard. Now the waiting game begins,” Williams said.

The declaration exceeded her expectations. The community had asked Barr to declare an emergency because of the lack of public safety and high rates of alcohol-related deaths.

The federal declaration came hours before Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed $6 million from the state’s Village Public Safety Officer Program.

Late last month, U.S. Attorney General William Barr spent three days touring Alaska with the congressional delegation to hear about and see for himself the lack of public safety in rural Alaska. He spent a day in Bethel and the nearby village of Napaskiak.

Barr’s security detail outnumbered the number of village public safety officers in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a region roughly the geographic size of Oregon.

Western Alaska has a public safety crisis, one that’s been there for decades.

A recent Anchorage Daily News article highlighted just how bad it is: At one point this year, at least 1 in 3 rural Alaska villages had no law enforcement. Western Alaska also has some of the highest rates of domestic violence and sexual assault in the nation, and ranks high in the number of murdered and missing Indigenous women.

With U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, by his side, the attorney general made his first visit to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

“You have to see it to understand it,” Barr said.

Barr said that it’s hard for him to imagine a “more vulnerable population.” And he said that even the bare minimum of basic safety standards is lacking in the Y-K Delta.

Barr and Murkowski first visited Bethel’s Tundra Women’s Coalition, one of two women’s shelters in the region. Staff there told them that they were over capacity and struggling to make room for families coming in. Ina Marie Chaney, a shelter manager, said that a case has to be pretty serious before the shelter can even consider it.

“Right now we’re screening on lethality cases,” Chaney told Murkowski and Barr.

And then Barr heard from the Association of Village Council Presidents about the public safety crisis and their ideas about fixing it. Reporters were not allowed in that meeting.

AVCP CEO Vivian Korthuis told KYUK later that they presented Barr with a plan to build seven public safety centers in the region, and she hopes that they will get the resources they need to build them.

Then it was time to visit Napaskiak. People lined the banks as the boats carrying Barr and Murkowski pulled up to shore.

Their first stop was the jail. Inside the large red building are cells made of wood, with wooden doors.

Napaskiak has two tribal police officers and two village police officers. All of them are working part-time; they work one week on and one week off. Napaskiak used to have two state-trained village public safety officers, but they left.

Barr also visited the school. There, Native Village of Napaskiak President Stephen Maxie Jr. begged him to declare an emergency because of how many alcohol-related deaths happened in the village over the past two years.

“The poor suffer the most, and they don’t got the most. They’re hurt the most because we’re always overlooked and always put aside,” Maxie said.

Barr said that he sees that the criminal justice system isn’t working for Alaska Native tribes. And as for the types of solutions, he said “everything is on the table.”

Meanwhile, another tribal police officer is set to leave after only a couple of months on the job: Harry Williams said that he plans to go to building maintenance. The reason? Better pay and benefits.

Barr has said he plans to return to the Y-K Delta. At an Anchorage meeting, he told leaders that he would schedule a followup meeting. So far, no date has been set.

Two more felony sexual assault charges have been brought against a Sitka physician, bringing the total now to 13.

A Sitka grand jury indicted Richard McGrath on two counts of sexual assault in the second degree last week. Prosecutors said that McGrath touched the breast of a female patient while she was unaware that a sexual act was being committed.

McGrath has been indicted twice previously this spring on 11 counts of sexual assault against two separate victims going back to November of last year. The new charges involve a third victim, who says McGrath assaulted them in March 2018.

McGrath was placed on administrative leave by Sitka Community Hospital in December, where he had worked under contract for four years. He was scheduled to begin work under a new contract when the original charges came to light.

McGrath has been scheduled for trial in December of this year. At the time of his arraignment in Sitka Superior Court on May 23, it wasn’t clear whether the separate cases against McGrath would be consolidated into a single trial. That question will likely come up again when McGrath is arraigned on these most recent charges on June 7.

McGrath has pleaded not guilty to all previous charges. He is being represented by Juneau defense attorney Julie Willoughby, who has told the court that her client intends to go to trial to clear his name.

McGrath remains free on $25,000 bail and has returned to his Seattle-area home.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr was in Bethel and Napaskiak Friday, May 31. The visit continued his Alaska tour, throughout which he met with public officials and Alaska Native leaders to discuss public safety, the lack of law enforcement in rural communities and how the federal government can help.

“This is the first trip I’ve taken, because I feel that this is the most pressing need in the country: to provide the basics of safe communities here,” Barr told KYUK.

In an interview with KYUK in Bethel, Attorney General Barr said there are a number of actions the Department of Justice can do to help but noted improvement at the federal level is needed as well.

BARR: We have sort of our traditional grant making programs, training programs, equipment programs, things like that that obviously can be brought to bear. But as I’ve been discussing with Senator Murkowski, I think what we have to do is be smarter about marshaling the resources we do have and spending them in a way that really addresses the problems here, and not just dribbling in grant money every three years to this program or that program, but a comprehensive approach. And I feel too often what we do is, we grant recipients or communities that are seeking help, [they] have to tailor their solutions to the structure of the grant programs, and I think it should be the other way around. I think we have to structure the support we give to the solutions that are tailored to the community by the community. And I think I can play a role with supporting Sen. Murkowski, Sen. Sullivan in Washington seeking an improved way of getting the help out here. It’s necessary from the federal government.

KYUK: What we see today in rural communities is a result of generational trauma. Some of it is historical, and then it’s passed family to family, and then you have isolated villages where you live with your perpetrators, and I know you heard some of those stories today. What role does the Justice Department have in breaking the cycle?

BARR: As Sen. Murkowski and I were discussing, most law enforcement problems really cannot be addressed solely by law enforcement. Ultimately it takes a more holistic approach. Law enforcement is sort of the indispensable part of that. But also you need prevention programs; you need victims’ programs. You need a whole range of programs to address, as you say, these endemic problems.

Now the Justice Department has a number of grant programs and others that address victims, that address sexual violence and taking care of the victims of sexual violence. But I think probably the highest priority now has to be figuring out how to get public safety officers, first responders, into the villages.

KYUK: You say it takes “going back to basics.” You said that at the Tundra Women’s Coalition earlier this morning. What does that mean?

BARR: Well, I think what I was referring to is that much of the federal government’s support goes to providing bells and whistles to law enforcement, state law enforcement, local law enforcement programs that are already relatively effective. What I was saying is here the very basics of public safety are lacking in the villages, and part of the basics are having first responders that can actually respond in a timely way. And that seems to me to be sort of an indispensable part of the solution.

KYUK: What do you keep in mind when you return to Washington?

BARR: I’ll keep in mind that there’s urgency here. You know, far too often we study problems as were sort of highlighted in this presentation today. You know, a lot of these problems have been discussed for a long time. And so I think there’s a sense of urgency here, and I will feel that sense of urgency in Washington to help with the efforts to address it. And as I said, I take away a lot of admiration for this community. And you know, they want to frame the solution for themselves and they need help in doing that, and I’m going to do everything I can from the vantage point I have in government to support that.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr met with Alaska Native leaders from around the state today in Anchorage to discuss law enforcement challenges in rural Alaska.

Barr will spend four days traveling around Alaska, learning about the unique challenges rural areas, particularly villages, face.

“Because of its vast size, and because of the diverse communities, and because of the lack sometimes of easy transportation, it created a lot of serious law enforcement challenges,” Barr said. “And it piqued my interest.”

At a roundtable discussion at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, Barr heard from Native leaders about high rates of violence towards Native women and children, the lack of law enforcement in many communities and the limited funding for the resources that currently exist.

“Imagine picking up the phone and calling for help in an emergency, knowing that help is hours away and may be dependent on weather,” said Northwest Arctic Borough mayor Lucy Nelson. She was one of the leaders who met with Barr.

“Enough is enough,” said Victor Joseph of the Tanana Chiefs Conference during his testimony.

“We can’t accept these problems as being normal for life in Alaska,” Ralph Andersen of the Bristol Bay Native Association told Barr.

“I believe we are the solution. I believe the tribes are the solution,” said Richard Peterson of the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. “And I believe, if we’re properly funded and we’re able to build the infrastructure we need, we’re the answer.”

Many of the leaders noted that it’s often hard to qualify for federal resources because of legal confusion between federal Indian Country laws and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Barr agrees.

“I understand exactly what you say, and I get frustrated, too, when all these little categories … ‘Well they don’t qualify because of this,’ and so forth,” Barr said. “I’d like to try and marshal what we have and address the problem.”

Barr described the Wednesday meeting as the first of several he’d like to hold in the state or in Washington, D.C., to help address problems in Native communities.

U.S. Justice Department officials wouldn’t go into full detail about the attorney general’s itinerary in Alaska, but a spokesman for Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said Barr will travel to Galena tomorrow and will visit the Yukon-Kuskokwim hub of Bethel and the village of Napaskiak on Friday.

Barr declined to answer a reporter question about statements White House Special Counsel Robert Mueller made today on whether or not President Donald Trump had broken the law and aided in Russian interference of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Alaska has one of the nation’s highest rates of sexual assault, and the state wants to improve how it responds to people who report these crimes to the Alaska State Troopers. A researcher leading a study on the topic is asking victim-survivors for help.

Dr. Ingrid Diane Johnson is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center. She knows that she’s asking people to do a hard thing: talk with her about their experience reporting sexual assault to state troopers.

“I’m asking them to talk to a stranger about something very traumatic and personal,” Johnson said. “I can promise confidentiality, so I can promise that I’m the only person who would know their name and that they did participate.”

Participants get a $45 gift card, but that’s not why they’ve been sharing their stories.

“They’re talking with me to help change the system and make it better,” Johnson said.

Every interview begins the same way: by asking about the assault. Answering is optional. From there, Johnson asks about the experience of reporting the assault and about how the case was handled.

“And then the second part,” Johnson explained, “we start to talk about what justice means for them in these types of cases, and whether they think justice was done in their case, and what kinds of things people could have done differently to make them feel like justice was done, what kind of recommendations they have for making improvements.”

Adults who reported a sexual assault to state troopers between 2006 and 2016 are asked to take part. If you’d like to participate, you can call Johnson at 907-786-1126 or email idjohnson@alaska.edu. Contacting her does not mean you have to do the interview.

“People are free to reach out to me just to ask questions or just to feel me out, talk to me a little bit and see if they even feel comfortable talking with me,” Johnson offered. “I’m happy to have a lot of initial conversations before someone even commits to doing an interview.”

Johnson is also interviewing the professionals who handle sexual assault cases once they’re reported, including people working in law enforcement, criminal justice, health care and advocacy.

The Alaska Department of Public Safety hired Johnson for the project using federal funds.