CALIFORNIA – California lawmakers held an assembly to discuss the implementation of the Feather Alert program Wednesday morning.
The statewide Feather Alert program was first put in place in 2022. It allows CHP to send out information immediately after a Tribal Member is reported missing under certain circumstances, similar to the nationwide Amber Alert system.
Officials with the Yurok Tribe spoke at the assembly about how they have already seen change through this system.
“Yurok Tribe did issue out a Feather Alert that was successful,” said Greg O’Rourke, police chief for the Yurok Tribe. “Some of the observations that I’ve seen from that Feather Alert were between my department’s social media page, the Yurok Tribe’s social media page we had nearly a thousand shares for this feather alert. CHP were able to get over two thousand shares.”
At the meeting, tribal leaders discussed proposed changes to how the Feather Alerts are run.
They spoke about wanting to allow local law enforcement and tribal police agencies to be able to issue the alerts instead of it being done solely through CHP.
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