North Coast families: Feather Alert system to report missing Indigenous people has too many barriers

It’s been almost a year since Yurok tribal member Taralyn Ipiña’s sister went missing in San Francisco.

In the summer of 2023, Ipiña’s sister lost communication with her family for six days before resurfacing. Although they are distrustful of law enforcement, they decided to file a missing person report with the San Francisco Police Department.

“Thinking about how incredibly traumatic it was – this moment-to-moment not knowing where she was, and thinking about all the family and friends that are currently missing their loved ones – I was just reliving that moment; I just bawled – I sobbed,” Ipiña said.

A few days later, Ipiña sought to use the Feather Alert system.

The Feather Alert was signed into law in 2022 to address the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People crisis, which includes the high rates of violence and abductions that tribes face in California. Southern California Assembly member James Ramos, D-Highland, authored the original bill, calling for a notification system, similar to the Amber Alert, which calls for an all-hands-on-deck approach to finding endangered children.

Ipiña remembers laying out her case to police, explaining why she thought her sister met the criteria for a Feather Alert. But she said she was met with a cold response.

“As soon as I mentioned my sister’s issues with substance abuse, the officer was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ And then it felt like it pivoted to where maybe they weren't necessarily going to issue [an alert] and later on, I was told that she did not meet the requirements … We were told that an adult woman that goes missing is a choice and that some people choose to be missing.”

The encounter left her family devastated, and it led Ipiña to testify at a hearing before California's Assembly Select Committee on Native American Affairs in January.

A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson said they were not immediately able to comment on the family’s concerns.

At least 60 percent of the families who have requested Feather Alerts have been denied, according to Ramos, some without reasons provided, leading Ramos to try to amend the law to remove barriers for Native families.

“It’s all we can do to ensure that the voices of those we’re (attempting) to protect have a voice in the process, and that’s truly where these amendments come from,” Ramos said in an interview with The Press Democrat.

The amended bill has passed through the state Assembly’s Emergency Management and Public Safety committees, and the committee on Appropriations has scheduled a hearing for May 8.

Ramos is hopeful the amended bill will pass Appropriations because the alert is already a low-cost resource for families to get widespread awareness for their missing loved ones.

The amendments would ensure the Feather Alert is shared on all law enforcement social media platforms and that local officials make all reasonable efforts to locate the individual.

They would also require the CHP, the agency that oversees the program, to provide a reason for denial within a specified time period.

At the legislative hearing in January, CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee testified that the issue often lies with local law enforcement agencies that handle the initial requests for a Feather Alert.

“There are so many factors that go into determining if they’re missing,” Duryee said, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times. “Just because someone doesn’t qualify for Feather Alert doesn’t mean we wash our hands clean.”

Duryee said law enforcement agencies still have the power to do “traditional police work,” such as using license plate recognition or cellphone data. “Just because an alert is not issued doesn’t mean law enforcement isn’t working on it,” he said.

Those explanations did not sit well with Ramos or the police chief of at least one tribal law enforcement agency.

“When you deny something to a tribal community without explanation, it's not just the denial of the Feather Alert, it seems like the denial of your existence through all the different atrocities in colonization and the history of trauma,” Ramos told The Press Democrat.

“Naturally people just think it’s because we’re Indian people,” said Ramos, who is the first and only Native American lawmaker in California.

One of the requirements for a Feather Alert is that the law enforcement agency “believes” that the person is in danger.

But Ramos and others argue that this definition needs reworking because it was unclear if it covers people with mental health or substance abuse issues, and leaves space for law enforcement officials to allow personal feelings or biases to enter into the equation.

Ipiña said she believed her sister would not want her family to go through the pain of not knowing what happened to her, despite law enforcement’s belief that she didn’t want to be found. That disconnect, she said, reflects the experiences of many California Natives, who are much more likely to be affected by violence and trafficking.

It also echoes the response that the family of Khadijah Britton felt. Britton, a 23-year-old member of the Wailacki Round Valley Indian Tribe, went missing in 2018 after she was last seen being pulled into a car at gunpoint in Covelo on the Round Valley Indian Reservation in Mendocino County. Police didn’t start searching until two days after her family filed a missing person report.

Her case is still unsolved, and her body has never been found.

Ramos argues that because of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People crisis in California, missing Native Americans are in danger regardless of what law enforcement officials might believe, and that agencies need to be more willing to issue the Feather Alert.

Much of the data on missing and murdered Indigenous people is outdated and underreported, experts agree. While the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs believes there are approximately 4,200 missing and murdered Indigenous peoples cases that have gone unsolved in America, that number is likely higher.

According to the nonprofit Sovereign Bodies Institute, 62% of all missing Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people in the state are not documented in any data repository. Two-spirit is the Indigenous term used to describe people who identify as both masculine and feminine.

In 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls in the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database, but the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System only logged 116 of those cases.

More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence in their lifetime, including 56.1% who were victims of sexual violence, according to a 2016 study by the National Institute of Justice.

Greg O’Rourke, the Yurok tribal police chief, calls the Feather Alert system “a really good opportunity for tribes and law enforcement to work together to be able to hear each other.” However, he took issue with the CHP commissioner’s characterization of local law enforcement as the problem and said there are clear problems with implementation.

He cited what he said was a lack of training and trauma-informed education on the part of CHP. Without that training, CHP’s role as gatekeepers of the alert became a barrier to families seeking help.

“CHP is looking at this to be objective, as they should as law enforcement, but that objectivity got in the way of why Feather Alert was implemented,” O’Rourke said.

He added that when Ramos, with the input of tribes, was drafting the original bill, CHP boasted the capacities of the Amber Alert system. As of Dec. 31, 2023, 1,200 children were successfully recovered through the AMBER Alert system, and at least 180 children were rescued because of wireless emergency alerts, according to CHP.

“So there's a big advertisement of ‘this is what we can do,’ but not what we will do, so there was this sense of betrayal in communities’” O’Rourke said.

“But I also understand what CHP is trying to do,” he said. “I get that we don’t want to inundate communities with alerts because it desensitizes them, but how do you tell a family that their missing loved one that they’re worried about, that you’re not going to pull out all the stops for them because you don’t want to desensitize the community?”

“So I think without knowing it, we kind of put CHP in a position to fail.”

You can reach Staff Writer Alana Minkler at 707-526-8531 or alana.minkler@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter,) @alana_minkler.