Jorge Barrera
APTN National News
The RCMP now says it will release a new report on murdered and missing Indigenous women on Friday.
RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Harold Pfleiderer said Monday the report was set for release Wednesday.
The RCMP issued a statement Wednesday saying the report, an update on work done since last year’s report, would be finally released Friday.
Pfleiderer did not respond to APTN‘s request for an explanation as to why the report’s release was again pushed back.
Initially, the RCMP said the report would be released in May.
The report is scheduled for release at 2 p.m.
The report is expected to focus on the “next steps” identified in the 2014 initial report. That report titled, National Overview on Murdered and Missing Aboriginal Women, revealed that 1,181 Indigenous women had been murdered or gone missing since 1980.
The next steps included a focus on “enhancing efforts on unresolved cases.” Almost half of missing and murdered Indigenous women cases fall under the jurisdiction of provincial or municipal police forces.
The RCMP also said it would be unveiling improvements on how it collects information on murdered or missing persons cases which would now include Aboriginal origin as an identifier.
The update report, however, will not include information on the “ethnicity of the perpetrators of solved Aboriginal women homicides.”
Earlier this year, the RCMP said it would release a new report after it became embroiled in a controversy triggered by Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt over that issue.
Valcourt said during closed-door meeting with some Alberta chiefs in March that 70 per cent of the perpetrators linked to solved Indigenous women murder cases were also Indigenous.
RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson confirmed the 70 per cent statistics in a letter to Treaty 6 Grand Chief Bernice Martial. Paulson said in the April 7 letter that consolidated data from 300 police agencies reviewed by the RCMP supported the statistic.
Paulson also said that in the cases of solved murders of Indigenous women, 25 per cent of the perpetrators were non-Indigenous and five per cent were of an unknown ethnicity.
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