Latest news with #TurquoiseAlert
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
When will Arizona voters get wise to Arizona's sorry excuse for a Legislature?
The Arizona Senate reportedly returns to the state Capitol this week after a chock-full month of doing, well nothing much, actually. This, following four arduous months of doing … well… I say senators "reportedly' are returning on May 28 because the Arizona House returned on May 20 after a two-week break wherein House Speaker Steve Montenegro promptly announced another two-week recess. It seems budget negotiations – those conversations that take place among a select few with absolutely no public input – aren't going so well. Heaven forbid our leaders get themselves to the Capitol and hear from the public before deciding how to spend our money. Or address a few of the bigger issues plaguing our state. Like a shortage of houses that people can actually afford. Or our crying need to protect what water we have and to find new sources of the stuff. Or the fact that $300 million in dedicated education funding will disappear on June 30, as Proposition 123 expires. For several years, our leaders have kicked that particular can down the road and now we've reached the end of it. Lawmakers will either have to find the $300 million in lost Prop. 123 funding elsewhere (as they have pledged to do) or stiff the schools. Republicans want to tie an extension of Prop. 123 to school vouchers. Basically, they want to hold Arizona's public schools hostage unless voters agree next year to protect Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, declaring that parents have a constitutional right to public money to pay their kids' private school tuition tab. Still, it's not like legislators haven't done anything in the first 134 days of what is supposed to be a 100-day session. They did pass a bill mandating that high school students be taught about the Gulf of America — a bill that Gov. Katie Hobbs promptly vetoed. And they established a Turquoise Alert system for missing Indigenous people, a bill that Hobbs signed. But they, with Hobbs' help, also trampled the constitutional rights of Scottsdale voters so that Axon, which makes Tasers, can build the state's largest apartment complex, voiding a successful campaign to put the issue to a public vote. And they spent a fair amount of time scheming to cut care for the state's most seriously disabled children, though in the end they didn't have the votes to discontinue to the Parents as Paid Caregivers program. Opinion: It took a seventh-grader to break Arizona's fight over disabled funding Fortunately, the Legislature still has a month to consider the affairs of state. Like the growing number of working Arizona parents who can't afford decent daycare and are on the Department of Economic Security's waitlist to get a childcare subsidy. The Legislature will either help those 4,500 children as part of their secret budget negotiations or tell their parents to suck I'm thinking the latter is likely. You know who will have no trouble getting help? Ken Kendrick, the bazillionaire owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks and one of the state's biggest contributors to Republican politicians. Look for our leaders to pony up a massive subsidy to fix up Chase Field. The only real question is whether they will use only tax money generated by the team or reach more deeply into our I know. It is our sacred obligation to provide the team with $500 million — possibly double that once interest is factored in — to renovate the publicly owned ballpark built for a team that now worth $1.6 billion, according to Forbes. One that Kendrick, bought for $238 million in 2004. Opinion: Deal to keep the Arizona Diamondbacks is a beanball aimed at taxpayers We either pay up or lose the team and the Valley will become a sports wasteland and little children will suffer because they want to be taken out the ballgame, but alas, there won't be one. Yeah, don't lay awake tonight worrying about the baseball team. Our leaders have their priorities, after all, and I'm confident that before June is out, they'll come up with a way to help the D-backs. The kids, not so much. Reach Roberts at Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @LaurieRobertsaz, on Threads at @LaurieRobertsaz and on BlueSky at @ Subscribe to today. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: AZ Senate returns. Will housing, school issues be fixed? | Opinion
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hobbs signs Turquoise Alert bill, named in honor of slain teen Emily Pike
Allred Pike, Jr., wore a red shirt with the image of Emily Pike emblazoned on its front. He spoke about his 14-year-old niece and how her brutal murder shook Indian Country and the state. He had come to the Arizona Capitol May 21 to watch Gov. Katie Hobbs sign a measure that will establish "Turquoise Alerts" for missing Indigenous people. It's known as "Emily's Law," named in honor of slain San Carlos Apache teen Emily Pike. "I'm conflicted," Pike said. "This bill is named after my niece, my niece who's not here no more." He said the event and the name of the law reminded all that Emily is gone. He joined other members of the Pike family, tribal and state leaders and members of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Task Force for the bill signing. "It's a good thing that an alert system is here for all of Indian Country," Pike said. "But the hard part is it's named after my brother's and Steff's daughter, and she's not here no more." Steff Dosela was Emily Pike's mother, and Jensen Pike was her father. Dosela stood with Pike at the event but didn't speak. Jensen Pike is serving time in an Arizona prison for arson and criminal damage. "While this bill was being considered in the state Legislature, we learned of the senseless murder of this beautiful, 14-year-old Emily, a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe," Hobbs said. "No parent, no tribal community should lose their child, their young member to violence." Emily Pike would have turned 15 last week, the governor said. "She should have celebrated with friends and family." While the law won't bring Emily back, Hobbs said she and others hope the Turquoise Alert will prevent other such losses. The alert, which Hobbs said would be implemented later this year, will issue missing person alerts for Native people up to age 65 after a law enforcement agency determines the person is missing. Hobbs also announced that the state would add $25,000 from the Department of Public Safety anti-racketeering fund to two other rewards of $75,000 each offered by the San Carlos Apache Tribe and the FBI for information on Emily's case. DPS Director Jeffrey Glover said the last time DPS offered a reward was during the Freeway Shooter case in 2015. San Carlos Apache Chairman Terry Rambler said Emily Pike had fallen through the cracks. The teenager ran away from a Mesa group home in late January. Her body was found dismembered on a trail off U.S. Highway 60 near Globe, almost 100 miles away, on Feb. 14. "We need to change the term 'runaway' to the description 'missing,'" he said. "That heightens the response of everybody." Labeling a person as a runaway, Rambler said, gives them several days or weeks in the hopes that they will return instead of immediately searching for them. An investigation by The Arizona Republic revealed a raft of miscommunications, overlapping jurisdictions and policies on how runaway youth are reported. Missing children: How the death of an 11-year-old Navajo girl helped expand Amber Alerts to tribal lands State Reps. Teresa Martinez, R-Casa Grande, and Walt Blackman, R-Snowflake, spoke at the Capitol May 20, a day before Hobbs's signing ceremony. Martinez was lead sponsor on the Turquoise Alert bill, which lawmakers passed unanimously. She said the bill was the result of a bipartisan effort. State Sen. Theresa Hatathlie, D-Tuba City, and fellow Democratic Reps. Mae Peshlakai, Myron Tsosie and Brian Garcia co-sponsored the bill establishing the Turquoise Alert. "When we ran the bill in January, we did not know that Emily was missing," Martinez said. "Think about that. A little girl goes missing, and no Amber Alert was issued." When Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis testified for the bill in January, legislators didn't know the girl was missing. "By the time the bill made it over to the Senate, we had realized that she had been missing for a month," Martinez said. "It horrifies me to think of a mother, a father out there not even knowing that their little girl is missing." Much work is needed to protect women and children of the state of Arizona, she said. "No one should be forgotten." Lewis, named for his uncle who went missing more than 60 years ago, said the bill's fast passage and unanimous support reflect the serious need for such services. "These, issues of safety, life and death of our very relatives are not partisan," he said. Lewis also thanked Martinez and other legislators for helping address the long-standing missing and murdered Indigenous person crisis. Arizona joins at least five other states that have adopted similar alerts to rapidly publicize missing Indigenous persons. Hatathlie called for further discussions on the "missing links" with an eye to amending laws to cover kids beyond those who are wards of the court or under Department of Child Safety oversight. "We want to have those agreements so we're there when our vulnerable community members need us and stepping up the resources that we have for our children," she said. She agreed with Rambler that Emily Pike fell through the cracks of many systemic barriers. "That's where we need to have that conversation, so that we are not talking, having this similar conversation years down the road regarding our children," Hatathlie said. Children in distress: Tribes seek foster care for kids in need, but strained resources lead some to group homes The legislators' call for more cooperation came on the heels of an annual surge in FBI agents and forensic resources to Indian Country. In April, the U.S. Justice Department initiated the third year of a multi-year initiative to address the MMIWP crisis. The FBI will rotate 60 people to field offices in 10 cities, including Phoenix and Albuquerque, for 90-day temporary duty assignments over six months. The operation also supports Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal law enforcement agencies with the latest forensic evidence processing technology and analytical expertise to tackle hard MMIWP cases. Several people at the ceremony asked what would happen once this year's surge is done. Navajo Nation Council Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty talked about the need for significant changes to the Major Crimes Act, which gives federal courts and law enforcement jurisdiction over felony crimes like murder committed against a Native person by another Native person on tribal lands. She said such changes could help return tribes the right to pursue justice in their own courts instead of waiting to see if the federal government will step in to investigate or to prosecute the cases. Jurisdictional issues like a non-Indian committing a major crime against a Native person and how far tribal courts can go to prosecute offenders have muddied the justice waters for decades. Crotty said that, absent making long-requested revisions to the law that took tribal prosecutorial rights away, tribes want to know how many cases the FBI is taking on. "How many cases are they declining?" she asked. "How many of those cases they are communicating and are they respecting our tribal law enforcement instead of segregating (cases) and making decisions without this kind of input?" But big questions about how to better serve justice in Indian Country and breaking down law enforcement silos wouldn't be answered this day. Instead, tribal and state law enforcement officials and leaders said they would continue working on intrastate communications and collaborations to help fill in the gaps that allowed Emily Pike to end up murdered on the side of the highway. Allred Pike thanked legislators and tribal leaders for sponsoring and passing the law and help save lives for other missing and murdered Indigenous women and people. "We thank you for keeping the memory of my niece alive," he said. "She was our daughter, our niece, our granddaughter, our cousin, our friend, and we're here to tell you that she mattered; her life mattered," Allred Pike said. The family understands that despite how hard it was to be in the spotlight, they must move forward, he said. "Emily's law is a step in the right direction." Arizona Republic reporter Stacey Barchenger contributed to this story. Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, @debkrol and on Bluesky at @ This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hobbs signs Turquoise Alert bill named in honor of Emily Pike
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Arizona Legislature unanimously approves Turquoise Alert System for missing Indigenous people
Community members wait in line at the water tank in Peridot, Arizona, so that they can place a red hand print of the mural honoring Emily Pike and everyone impacted by the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples crisis. Photo by Shondiin Silversmith | Arizona Mirror The creation of the Turquoise Alert System cleared its final legislative hurdle on Wednesday when it passed the state House of Representatives unanimously The new system, which would function similarly to the existing Amber Alert and Silver Alert notification systems, would coordinate alerts for missing Indigenous or endangered persons through the federally authorized Emergency Alert System. The final passage comes less than a week after the state Senate amended the legislation, House Bill 2281, to include minors who go missing. The change allows the alert system to be activated in cases like Emily Pike's, an Indigenous teen whose disappearance and murder earlier this year was cited by lawmakers as the impetus for the measure. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Rep. Teresa Martinez, R-Casa Grande, said she introduced the bill before Pike's story became public, and that the Turquoise Alert could have prevented her murder. 'It breaks my heart that we, the State of Arizona, didn't even go looking for this little girl,' she said. 'We cannot let children go missing without somebody being alerted.' Democratic Rep. Brian Garcia, a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, said the alert will save lives. 'One day, what happened to Emily won't happen to another child,' he said. More than 10,600 Indigenous people were reported missing in the U.S. in 2023, roughly 3,300 of whom were 18 or older, according to the FBI. The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System reported that more than 23,700 missing persons cases were in the database at the end of 2023, and 255 of those were for Indigenous people. In 2021, Arizona was ranked as the state with the third-largest number of unresolved missing Indigenous people cases in the country, according to NamUs. There are currently 91 missing Indigenous people cases in the NamUs database for Arizona. A study from the Urban Indian Health Institute found that Arizona also has the third-largest number of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the country. That study reported 506 known cases in 71 urban areas across the country, 54 of which were in Arizona, including 31 in Tucson. There is still no single database that provides accurate numbers or data related to missing and murdered Indigenous peoples across the country. With no centralized database among the thousands of federal, state and tribal entities, the information available is limited. The Turquoise Alert system has been a priority for Indigenous advocates for years, and was requested in 2019, when Arizona's first Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women study committee examined the crisis. 'Indigenous people go missing at a higher rate than any other ethnicity,' Elayne Gregg, whose 7-year-old daughter was abducted and killed in 2009, told the Arizona Mirror earlier this year. 'Because that rate is so high, something like this needs to happen.' The bill has received broad bipartisan support as it moved through the legislative process, making it likely that Gov. Katie Hobbs will sign it into law. Hobbs has already directed the Arizona Department of Public Safety to develop a plan for implementing a new alert for Indigenous people by summer. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
ICT NEWSCAST: New Mexico's Turquoise Alert, Lily Gladstone's new film, and more
The ICT Newscast for Friday, April 18, 2025, features New Mexico's new Turquoise Alert for missing Indigenous people and Redding Rancheria's wellness campus in California. Plus, stories on boarding school legacies and a one-on-one interview with Lily Gladstone. Check out the ICT Newscast on YouTube for this episode and more. New Mexico joins three other states in implementing a Turquoise Alert system to locate missing Native people, responding to the urgent crisis of disappearances across Indian Country. In Northern California, the Redding Rancheria breaks ground on a 200,000 square-foot wellness campus blending traditional healing and Western medicine to address chronic illness in Native communities. Three years ago, Mary Annette Pember, ICT national correspondent, started exploring her mother's history in a Catholic boarding school. That journey led to her new book, "Medicine River: A Story of Survival and The Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools." ICT has the exclusive interview ahead of the book's release. Lily Gladstone brings the laugh, in the romantic comedy 'The Wedding Banquet.' Gladstone plays Lee, a woman starting a family with her partner in Seattle. Known for dramatic roles, Gladstone shares how returning to comedy feels natural and how she helped shape her character to reflect the local Duwamish community. View previous ICT broadcasts here every week for the latest news from around Indian Country. ICT is owned by IndiJ Public Media, a nonprofit news organization. Will you support our work? All of our content is free. There are no subscriptions or costs. And we have hired more Native journalists in the past year than any news organization ─ and with your help we will continue to grow and create career paths for our people. Support ICT for as little as $10. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter.
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
New Mexico set to create ‘Turquoise Alert' system for missing Indigenous people
From left, Sen. Angel Charley, D-Acoma, and Rep. Michelle Paulene Abeyta, D-To'hajiilee, prepare to introduce Senate Bill 41, creating a Turquoise Alert system, on Feb. 7, 2025. (Bella Davis/New Mexico In Depth) New Mexico is set to become the fourth state to create an alert system meant to help find Native Americans who have gone missing. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham plans to sign Senate Bill 41 into law, establishing a Turquoise Alert system, according to her office, after the bill passed both chambers of the Legislature unanimously. Operating much like the state's Amber Alert system for abducted children, Turquoise Alerts would be issued for people who are enrolled in or eligible for enrollment in a federally or state-recognized tribe and are missing under unexplained or suspicious circumstances or are at heightened risk due to health concerns or disabilities. Colorado, California and Washington have established similar alerts. Since Washington's system was created in 2022, 114 alerts had gone out as of August last year, and 111 of those people were located, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. This story was originally published by New Mexico In Depth Lawmakers in New Mexico have passed a couple other bills in recent years responding to a national crisis of Indigenous people disproportionately going missing and being killed. There are 186 Indigenous people missing from the state, according to the state Department of Justice, and the average number of days missing is 1,662, or about four and a half years. The alert is especially needed on reservations, where jurisdictional confusion and understaffed law enforcement agencies are major obstacles to public safety, said Rep. Michelle Paulene Abeyta (Diné), a Democrat from To'hajiilee and one of the bill's sponsors. 'When someone goes missing, we're combining our own resources outside of law enforcement and any actual government-run entity to try to locate our missing loved ones,' Abeyta said Monday in an interview. 'We know how important this is and how the lack of resources just isn't fair for us and the jurisdictional issues that get in the way. It's not right.' In the '90s, when she was a child, Abeyta's mother went missing. She was taken to a remote area and 'beaten and left to die,' Abeyta said, before being found a few days later by a person who happened to be in the area. She was brought to a hospital and survived, but her recovery was difficult. Abeyta and her co-sponsor Sen. Angel Charley (Laguna/Zuni/Diné), D-Acoma, are 'excited to see how this is going to help improve the lives of so many families that for a long time needed some type of solution, some type of resource to go to,' Abeyta said. While helping solve logistical barriers, the alert system would also raise awareness about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people, Charley said in an interview Friday. Charley, who used to be the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, referenced Ashlynne Mike, an 11-year-old Diné girl who was kidnapped and murdered in northwestern New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation, in 2016. Law enforcement didn't issue an Amber Alert until the day after she went missing due to 'misunderstandings and jurisdictional hurdles,' according to the Justice Department. 'You never know if coordination would have happened in a way that was quick and efficient' if there had been greater awareness at the time, Charley said. After lawmakers passed the bill last week, Ashlynne's father contacted Charley, telling her he was going to write to Lujan Grisham and urge her to sign it. 'We do not want other families to go through the trauma we felt,' he wrote in a message Charley shared with New Mexico In Depth with his permission. Indigenous advocates, tribal leaders and police, and lobbyists representing several pueblos also spoke in support of the bill during the session. The bill requires the Department of Public Safety to develop a plan for getting alerts out as quickly as possible and keeping records on each alert, with information including the municipality where the missing person report was made, the date the alert was issued and the date the missing person is recovered. 'Too many Native American families have faced crisis and the heartbreak of a loved one disappearing without the swift response they deserve,' Indian Affairs Secretary Josett Monette, whose agency developed the bill, said in a statement. 'The Turquoise Alert system is a critical step forward in ensuring that missing Native American people are prioritized in the same way as other emergency alerts.' The alert aligns with a state response plan issued by a task force in 2022, Monette told lawmakers last month. That now-defunct task force discussed an alert system for missing Indigenous people, said Darlene Gomez, a task force member and attorney who represents affected families. Gomez suggested that New Mexico should create such an alert during public comment at a December meeting of a new state task force focused on the crisis.
