Story at a glance
- A Minnesota task force examining violence against Black women and girls began its work on Monday, planning to deliver a number of policy solutions to the state legislature by December 2022.
- The task force was approved by the state legislature earlier this year and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, who ceremoniously signed a copy of the legislation Monday at a news conference ahead of the group’s inaugural meeting.
- The task force is modeled after a similar group looking into violence against Indigenous women and girls in Minnesota.
A Minnesota task force on Monday began an investigation into why Black women and girls in the state experience violence at disproportionate rates.
The 12-person panel was approved by the Minnesota legislature earlier this year as part of a public safety budget bill and signed into law by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz shortly after.
The task force is the first state-established group on missing and murdered Black women, and is modeled after a similar task force in Minnesota examining violence against Indigenous women and girls, which delivered 20 policy recommendations to the state legislature in December.
More Black women are killed in the U.S. than any other race, according to a 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, and homicide rates among Black women are nearly three times that of white women. In 2020, Black women and girls were murdered at a rate of four per day, according to FBI statistics released earlier this year.
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“What we know right now is we don’t know enough about missing Black women and girls and women who have been murdered,” Minnesota Rep. Ruth Richardson, who first proposed the idea of creating the task force, said at a news conference ahead of the panel’s inaugural meeting.
Richardson said the task force’s meeting Monday was a critical step in developing a framework to reduce violence against Minnesota’s Black female population and resolve cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls.
“We are going to leave this task force with a blueprint: a blueprint for change, a blueprint to bring Black women and girls home, a blueprint to solve their crimes and to be able to ensure that everyone has equal access to the services that they need when they need them,” she said.
The task force is scheduled to deliver their findings and policy solutions before next December.
Gov. Walz at Monday’s news conference ceremoniously signed a copy of the legislation which created the task force.
“The state of Minnesota’s not going to set back and look at the statistics and just say, ‘That’s too bad.’ The idea is it has to stop with us,” he said during the conference.
State law enforcement officials, even before the task force began meeting officially, said they were eager to work with panel members.
“I believe that the notoriety is already having an impact, it is calling the question and there are voices across the United States that are calling this question to say, ‘If not now, when?,” Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said Monday.
“We need to make sure that law enforcement and the community know these cases are important and they deserve our attention,” he said.
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