Clarice Hardy couldn’t remember much about that night in March 2017, except that she felt “woozy” at the local bar where she had been hanging out. She didn’t know how she got home, just that she got there. She would only learn that she had been sexually assaulted the next day, when friends told her they had seen a video of what happened on Snapchat.



But she was a 911 dispatcher and felt like she knew what to do next. Reporting the assault, which can be daunting for many victims, was a matter of talking to her colleague, then-Lieutenant Nick Harvey, at the Nome Police Department, where they both worked. Hardy trusted Harvey when he said that he would open an investigation and file for a warrant. “He definitely made me feel like he was doing his job,” Hardy told The New Republic. “Just the way that he assured me that he was working on it—I believed him.” When she found out that it had reportedly all been a lie—that there was never a report or an investigation—she thought that would be the worst of what had already been a traumatic year. Then she found out she wasn’t the only one.

On Thursday, the Alaska branch of the American Civil Liberties Union announced a lawsuit filed on Hardy’s behalf against the city of Nome and two members of its police department, including Harvey. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of criticisms leveled against the NPD by Alaska Native women, who say that law enforcement has not taken the violence they face seriously. The department has come under fire for an alleged routine practice of disregarding Alaska Native women’s reports of assault.

In one case, a woman told the Associated Press that Harvey attempted to stop a nurse from performing her rape kit exam after the alleged perpetrator told him that the encounter had been consensual. “The Officer stated that he was going to cancel the exam because he had already talked to the suspect and the man admitted that he ‘had sex’ with the patient but that it was consensual,” the nurse wrote in the report, as reported by the AP. “Therefore the officer did not see a need for an exam.” In another case, a woman told the Anchorage Daily News that nothing happened after she went through an interview about her assault with an officer in Nome. “That was the first and last time I heard [from] them,” she said.

Like many issues in Indian Country, invisibility among the American public is a major obstacle to justice. But Hardy wasn’t invisible to the NPD. She knew her colleagues—was supposed to be one of them. That still didn’t protect her.