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Experts tell Assembly Public Law 280 and under‑resourcing drive MMIP response gaps
Summary
Legal scholars, tribal leaders and advocates told the Select Committee that Public Law 280’s transfer of jurisdiction without funds has left California tribes under‑resourced, reduced trust in state actors and made investigations harder, and they proposed training, cross‑deputization and retrocession as partial remedies.
Public Law 280 — the federal statute that gave certain states criminal jurisdiction in Indian country — was a recurring focus at the Select Committee hearing, with witnesses saying the law’s practical effects have worsened investigations of missing and murdered Indigenous people.
"Public Law 280 makes the problem of missing and murdered indigenous persons more difficult to address for several reasons," said Carol Goldberg, a UCLA law professor who has researched PL 280 for more than five decades. She told the committee the law "left states like California ... no funds to carry it out," creating a funding vacuum for tribal policing and justice systems.
Morning Star Gali, a Pit River descendant and advocate, said the jurisdictional gaps create a "legal vacuum" that traffickers and violent offenders exploit and that survivors frequently face agency hopping: being "bounced from agency to agency while perpetrators continuously walk free."
Speakers proposed several remedies that stop short of wholesale federal change: mandated cultural competency and PL 280 training for county and state officers, formal cross‑deputization agreements, state incentives for tribal‑state policing compacts and—where tribes request it—federal retrocession of jurisdiction to tribes. Goldberg noted Washington state legislation that ties retrocession offers to tribal requests as a model.
Tribal leaders said under‑resourcing is not hypothetical. Chairperson Cheyenne Stone described archaeological and forensic findings from construction projects in Owens Valley and linked the ongoing harms to insufficient state and county processes for discovered remains and consultations.
Advocates asked the Legislature and state agencies to use budget authority to close practical gaps in the near term: fund tribal public‑safety capacity, prioritize DNA and forensic lab resources, and require post‑certified trainings that include tribal consultation and culturally informed investigative practices. No formal policy change was adopted at the hearing; committee members asked the attorney general’s advisory council on PL 280 to continue work on training and implementation recommendations.
