✍🏾: @lexisryann
On Feb. 20, the Minnesota House voted 110-19 to advance House Bill HF55.
Minnesota state lawmakers are moving forward with the bill to establish the nation’s first office to investigate cases of missing Black women and girls.
Similar bills passed in the Minnesota House but failed in the Senate in previous years. If the legislation is signed into law, it would require the Bureau of Criminal Apprenticeship to operate a missing person alert program for Black women and girls.
The Office of Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls would review missing persons and cold cases. The first-of-its-kind project is expected to cost roughly $2.5 million.
In the U.S., Black women only comprise 13% of the female population. Still, studies found they make up 35% of the country’s missing women. In 2020, during the pandemic, nearly 100,000 of the 250,000 women that went missing in the U.S. were women of color. #BWLM💕
