Title: Policing on American Indian Reservations
Series: Research Report
Author: Stewart Wakeling, Miriam Jorgensen, Susan Michaelson, Manley
Begay
Published: National Institute of Justice, July 2001
Subject: Other issues in criminal justice: Native Americans
115 pages
295,000 bytes

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Research Report

Policing on American Indian Reservations
Stewart Wakeling
Miriam Jorgensen
Susan Michaelson
Manley Begay

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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531

John Ashcroft
Attorney General

Office of Justice Programs
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov

National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij

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Policing on American Indian Reservations
A Report to the National Institute of Justice
Stewart Wakeling
Miriam Jorgensen
Susan Michaelson
Manley Begay

Francis X. Hartmann, Co-Principal Investigator
Joseph P. Kalt, Co-Principal Investigator

Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management
and
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development

Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

July 2001
NCJ 188095

------------------------------

Winifred Reed and Phillis McDonald
Program Monitors

Stewart Wakeling, Susan Michaelson, and Francis X. Hartmann are
affiliates of Harvard University's Program in Criminal Justice Policy and
Management; Miriam Jorgensen, Manley Begay, and Joseph P. Kalt are
affiliates of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic
Development. This research was supported under award #95-IJ-CX-0086
from the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S.
Department of Justice. All points of view expressed in this paper are those
of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S.
Department of Justice or Harvard University.

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

------------------------------

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank each of the tribes and tribal police departments
that participated in this study for their generous help. Without the
information they provided, the work would not have been possible. In
particular, we wish to thank the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes
of the Flathead Reservation, the Gila River Indian Community, the Three
Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, and the Tohono
O'odham Nation for providing access to their police departments, criminal
justice systems, and other governmental units. Knowledge we gained from
our time on site formed the core of our research.

In addition to thanking the four tribal governments, we would like to
express our appreciation to the people on each reservation who assisted us
in so many ways: sharing information, offering guidance, telling stories,
and helping us to get it right. These people included tribal leaders; elders
and other community residents; department officials; department clerks
and others who tolerated our many requests and questions; and, especially,
the police chiefs, captains, and officers who spent many hours talking to
us, giving us information, and allowing us to ride with them.

We also thank the many individuals in police departments who took the
time to complete the surveys. These questionnaires provided an important
picture of policing across many departments in Indian Country.

Officials in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Division of Law
Enforcement Services also were extremely helpful. In particular, Ted
Quasula (Chief, BIA, Division of Law Enforcement Services) and Brent
LaRocque (Criminal Investigator, BIA, Division of Law Enforcement
Services) talked with us at length, introduced us to people both on and off
the reservations, provided documents, and supported our work throughout
the course of the project. Their perspectives and knowledge of Indian
Country were invaluable.

We were fortunate to collaborate on the survey with Eileen Luna, assistant
professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona.
Through this partnership, we were able to reach more tribes and gather
more data than we would have been able to on our own.

The authors received essential assistance from staff at the Program in
Criminal Justice Policy and Management: Mairgreg Agen, Stephen
Brimley, Edward Gomeau, Gillian Thomson, and Melissa Weintraub.
Their contributions, especially to the survey analysis and literature search,
are woven throughout the final product.

We are especially grateful to our funder, the National Institute of Justice
(Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice), for seeing the
value in our proposed study. We hope and believe that their recognition of
the need for research on Indian Country policing--as evidenced by their
support of this study and others--will contribute to tribes' efforts to
improve policing, public safety, and the quality of life in their
communities.

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Executive Summary

Introduction

This study had two principal goals. The first was to take a broad look at
policing in Indian Country in order to better understand the many
arrangements for administering reservation police departments, develop an
initial assessment of the challenges facing Indian policing, and identify
policing strategies and approaches that might be successful in responding
to the growing crime problem in Indian Country. The second was to
evaluate the prospects for community policing in Indian Country. Could
this strategy, which grew out of the experience of police departments in
urban settings, be usefully applied to the strikingly different cultural,
geographic, and demographic features typical of Indian reservations? This
study is a first effort to characterize the variety of arrangements for
reservation policing combined with a more comprehensive effort to better
understand the operations of a limited set of representative departments
and their tribal contexts.

Methodology

Research for this study included several components. We began with a
literature review and visits to several Indian police departments and the
Indian Police Academy in New Mexico. We then distributed a two-part
survey to Indian police departments and undertook intensive site visits to
four reservations. The strategy for selecting study sites was to choose
Indian nations that varied on as many relevant dimensions as could be
captured in a small sample. The four nations selected were the Tohono
O'odham (in Arizona), the Gila River Indian Community (also in
Arizona), the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead
Reservation (in Montana), and the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort
Berthold Reservation (in North Dakota). We studied these reservation
departments and the tribal contexts in which they operate in order to gain a
richer understanding of the diverse and complex ways in which Native
communities cope with policing challenges. One caution is offered here
and echoed in the work of other researchers and practitioners in Indian
Country (for example, Elias 1998): All but the most basic and easily
verified data must be interpreted carefully. For complex reasons,
researchers must hold very loosely to data describing important
dimensions of policing (including crime) in Indian Country.

Policing in Indian Country: The Context

In the mid-1990s, estimates of the non-Alaska service population (the
number of Native Americans living on or very near reservations) ranged
from 1.1 to 1.3 million (Indian Health Service 1997). This population is
distributed across the more than 330 Indian nations in the continental
United States.

Indian nations exhibit an exceptionally wide variety of social and
economic characteristics. One important additional type of variation is the
substantial cultural diversity found among American Indian communities.
While "American Indian" is a single race category on the U.S. Census,
members of one tribe can be as different from those of another tribe as
citizens of Greece are from citizens of Vietnam. Even so, most Indian
nations face severe social and economic problems. Despite new tribal
opportunities and ventures, American Indians living on reservations have
been and may remain the poorest minority in the United States (Kilborn
1992; Cornell et al. 1998; Pace 2000).

More than 200 police departments operate in Indian Country, serving an
even larger number of tribal communities. These departments range in size
from only 2 or 3 officers to more than 200 officers. The communities they
serve are as small as the Grand Canyon-based Havasupai Tribe (with a
population of only 600) and as large as the Navajo Nation (with a
population of more than 250,000 and a land area larger than the State of
Connecticut).

The most common administrative arrangement for police departments in
Indian Country is organization under the auspices of the Indian Self-
Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. Also known as
Public Law 93-638 (PL 93-638), this law gives tribes the opportunity to
establish their own government functions by contracting with the Bureau
of Indian Affairs (BIA). Thus, "638ed" departments are administered by
tribes under contract with the BIA's Division of Law Enforcement
Services. Typically, a 638 contract establishes the department's
organizational framework and performance standards and provides basic
funding for the police function. Officers and nonsworn staff of these
departments are tribal employees.

Departments administered by the BIA are the second most common type
of police department in Indian Country. Staff in these departments are
Federal employees. For many years, patrol officers were under the line
authority of the local BIA superintendent (each reservation has a BIA
superintendent who oversees all or most of the BIA functions on that
reservation), and criminal investigators were under the line authority of the
BIA's Division of Law Enforcement Services. Recent changes have placed
line authority for patrol under the BIA's Division of Law Enforcement
Services as well.

Less common are departments that receive funding under the auspices of
the self-governance amendments to PL 93-638 and departments that are
funded completely with tribal money. These arrangements grant tribes
much more control over government functions than is permitted under 638
contracts. A number of tribes rely on State and local authorities for police
services under Public Law 83-280, 67 Stat. 588 (1953). This law, passed
as part of a larger effort to "terminate" American Indian tribes, gave a
number of States the power to enforce the same criminal laws within
Indian Country as they did outside of Indian Country.

The typical department serves an area the size of Delaware, but with a
population of only 10,000, that is patrolled by no more than three police
officers and as few as one officer at any one time (a level of police
coverage that is much lower than in other urban and rural areas of the
country). In other words, the typical setting is a large area with a relatively
small population patrolled by a small number of police officers; the
superficial description is of a rural environment with rural-style policing.
In fact, many reservation residents live in fairly dense communities, which
share attributes of suburban and urban areas. Officers who work in Indian
Country are almost always graduates of high schools and certified law
enforcement training academies; a slight majority are Native American. 

Eileen Luna and Samuel Walker (1998) offer detailed statistical profiles of
these departments. Therefore, our focus is on the core management
challenges across the range of departments. While there are many more
small departments (approximately 150) than medium-sized or large
departments, they serve substantially fewer people--between 25 and 30
percent of all the citizens served by the BIA and tribally administered
police departments in Indian Country. These very small departments have
at most nine officers. Among the most important challenges facing these
departments is providing around-the-clock police coverage to their
communities. These departments rarely have more than one officer on
duty at any time, and their officers often work without adequate backup.
They are true generalists, working across numerous police and
administrative functions.

There are more than 75 medium-sized police departments in Indian
Country, serving over half of the Native Americans living in reservation
communities subject to BIA or tribal policing. These departments have
from 10 to 50 officers. The key organizational attribute that distinguishes
medium-sized departments from small departments is that it is
theoretically possible for these departments to provide 24-hour police
coverage, even though it may be quite difficult in practical terms. At the
high end of the size range, departments can support some specialized
activities; not only are some officers free to focus on standard patrol
activities, but some may specialize in such areas as substance abuse and
domestic violence. This transition signals a staffing level at which
specialization can help a department focus on critical strategic issues.

Two police departments in Indian Country--those of the Navajo Nation
and the Oglala Sioux Tribe--have 100 or more officers. These departments
serve about 15 percent of the residents of Indian Country and feature
levels of organizational complexity not present in smaller departments.
This complexity is driven by increased specialization, more elaborate
oversight mechanisms, district-based organization, and other factors.

Inadequate funding is an important obstacle to good policing in Indian
Country. Existing data suggest that tribes have between 55 and 75 percent
of the resource base available to non-Indian communities. But the terms
used in this comparison may underestimate the resource needs of Indian
Country departments. The appropriate police coverage (police officers per
thousand residents) comparison may not be between Indian departments
and departments serving communities of similar size, but between Indian
departments and communities with similar crime problems. Given that the
violent crime rate in Indian Country is between double and triple the
national average (Greenfeld and Smith 1999, 2), comparable communities
would be large urban areas with high violent crime rates. For example,
Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and Washington, D.C., feature high
police-to-citizen ratios, from 3.9 to 6.6 officers per thousand residents
(Bureau of Justice Statistics 1998).[1] Few, if any, departments in Indian
Country have ratios of more than 2 officers per thousand residents.

Crime Trends in Indian Country

The threat of increasing crime, particularly violent crime, is especially
worrisome because we know far less than we would like about crime in
Indian Country. The lack of good data on crime in Indian Country stems
from (1) issues of culture, geography, and economics unique to American
Indian reservations; (2) the limited administrative and technological
resources available to tribal police departments; (3) inadequate
coordination between tribal and Federal agencies; and (4) management
problems common to both tribal and BIA police departments. Even when
it is possible to obtain accurate tribal-level data, the prevalence and
character of crime vary widely from reservation to reservation. Our
research suggests the following about the general prevalence, distribution,
and character of crime on reservations:

 o The overall workload of police departments in Indian Country has been
increasing at a significant rate. In other words, the intensity and range of
problems to which police departments in Indian Country must respond
appear to be increasing.

 o Although many Native reservation residents live in rural, isolated areas,
a significant percentage of reservation populations has settled in
semiurban communities. Much, if not most, crime on reservations occurs
in these fairly dense areas.

 o Notwithstanding the recent reports of dramatic increases in violent
crime on reservations, especially among youth, the crimes that most
occupy police in Indian Country are directly or indirectly related to
alcohol abuse. Alcohol-related crime is a deep and complex problem,
which--by contrast to the problem of violent crime--has received
insufficient attention (and resources).

The State of Policing in Indian Country

The typical department that we describe is attempting to cope with an
increasing workload (a change driven by rising crime, increased police
involvement in the social concerns that relate to crime, and greater
community demands for police services) and is doing so with a quite
limited resource base. In fact, this characterization only begins to capture
the severity and complexity of the challenges to reservation policing.
Police
in Indian Country function within a complicated jurisdictional web,
answer to multiple authorities, may operate without strategic direction
from their tribal governments, and often lack a sense of "partnership" with
their service populations. In a review of one of the largest police
departments in Indian Country, Naranjo and colleagues (1996) both echo
and expand on these concerns. They find that--

 o Poor employee morale and high turnover result in a lack of well-
qualified and experienced officers.

 o Inadequate budgets, fiscal mismanagement, and even corruption create
serious obstacles to the effective delivery of important police services and
programs.

 o Basic departmental management is flawed.

 o Undue political interference in police operations inhibits the ability of
the police to perform their duties in a fair and equitable manner and
reduces the credibility of the police in the eyes of the community.

Such findings have led many researchers, policymakers, and police
professionals to conclude that reservation policing is in crisis. In response,
a number of special reports, commissions, conferences, and blue-ribbon
committees have grappled with the problems and have produced a wide
variety of recommendations and proposals. These include increasing
funding, tightening management, clarifying ambiguous reporting
relationships, and improving technology. Many of these responses are
necessary to improve policing in Indian Country, but we are concerned
that they may treat the symptoms, rather than the disease.

In particular, we argue that many of the problems with policing in Indian
Country, which subsequently affect the quality of policing, are linked in
important ways to Federal policy. Strong evidence points to longstanding,
cumulative negative effects of Federal policy on the practice of policing in
Indian Country. The historical record shows how Federal policy created a
system that served the interests of the U.S. government and nontribal
citizens and failed to promote the ability of Indian nations to design and
exert meaningful control over their own policing institutions. Departments
administered by the BIA are not agents of tribes but of the Federal
Government and, as such, have limited incentive to look to the
communities they serve for legitimacy or for authorization of the police
function. Over time, this arrangement has created a significant gap
between tribal police and the communities they serve, a gap that is
reflected in mismatches between police and community priorities and
between police methods and tribal norms and values.

We stress that when tribal members do turn to the police with problems,
they encounter organizations with priorities that have been shaped by a
model of policing that limits their attention to a narrow band of crime
problems and police strategies. An emblematic example of this philosophy
came from a high BIA official encountered on a site visit who stated,
"Law enforcement is law enforcement"--a claim that often exempts Indian
police departments from adapting strategies, policies, and procedures to
local needs. As a result, disputes, conflicts, and problems that police and
citizens see as each other's responsibility can continue to simmer and
escalate into real crimes. In addition, as tribal members conclude that the
police are insensitive and unresponsive to community needs, their support
for the police diminishes.

Lessons From Research on Effective Governance in Indian Country

A substantial body of research suggests a road map for understanding and
beginning to remedy the problems with policing that are rooted in Federal
policy. Beginning in the 1970s, a handful of Indian nations embarked on
successful paths of social and economic development. Research by the
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development indicates
that the common denominator among these successful tribes was an
effective government--one that was capable of both determining and
implementing the policy priorities of the community.

One indicator of a tribal government's ability to make and implement
effective decisions is whether or not it has increased control over its own
institutions. Stability, the separation of powers, and competent, respected
bureaucracies are further indicators of a tribal government's effectiveness.
The research also indicates that an alignment between the form and
powers of a government's contemporary institutions and the form and
powers of its prereservation institutions is most likely to create this
stability, respect, and legitimacy.

An important lesson from this research is the effect of increased tribal
control over tribal institutions. Only those tribes that have acquired
meaningful control over their governing institutions have experienced
improvements in local economic and social conditions. The research has
not found a single case of sustained economic development where the tribe
is not in the driver's seat. While tribal-BIA relationships in thriving Indian
nations range from cooperative to contentious, they are all characterized
by a demotion of the BIA (and of other Federal agencies) from
decisionmaker to advisor and provider of technical assistance. The general
point is that self-determined institutions, ones that reflect American Indian
nations' sovereignty, are more effective.

This lesson has yet to be applied to Indian policing. Federal policies that
regulate Indian policing have the twin effect of reducing tribal control and
diffusing accountability for institutional performance. Tribes regularly
blame Federal agencies for the poor state of policing in Indian Country;
not only are the resources provided by Federal agencies inadequate, but
Federal policies are driven by a misreading of tribes' real needs and
priorities. On the other hand, representatives of Federal agencies express
skepticism about the ability and intention of tribes to develop and manage
effective police departments. The very fact that power is shared between
tribal and Federal authorities allows each to avoid their more appropriate
roles and, thus, to perpetuate poor policing.

The second relevant lesson for Indian policing from this research is the
importance of cultural match. A consonance between present and
prereservation institutional forms confers legitimacy on the methods and
outcomes of government decisionmaking and channels political energy in
productive directions. How do the dynamics of cultural match play out in
practical terms? The police officer at Tohono O'odham who aggressively
confronts a suspect will have offended longstanding tribal norms and will
have failed to draw on them in the service of obtaining the suspect's
compliance. By contrast, the police officer at Turtle Mountain or one of
the Lakota tribes who fails to confront a suspect is guilty of the same error.
To the extent that the ethos of the organization in which these officers
work perpetuates such conflicts, both public support for and the
effectiveness of the organization are diminished. It is, however, important
not to be naive about the possibilities. There are no guarantees that
prereservation institutions will be effective in a contemporary setting. If
old forms cannot be adapted to modern problems, the challenge becomes
to design new ones that both make cultural sense and work.

The Possibilities for Community Policing in Indian Country

If the roots of the problems with Indian policing lie in Federal policy, and
if a road map for remedying these problems is provided by research
showing how the effectiveness of other tribal government functions has
increased, the question remains: How, exactly, can similar work be
accomplished with policing?

Community policing may be the answer. Community policing is a method
by which communities lend their authority to the police enterprise, see
their norms and values reflected in the police mission, and employ their
considerable formal and informal resources to address crime. In turn, the
strategy enhances the capacity of police to address crime and to help
communities become strong, independent, and resourceful. (We emphasize
that community policing is not only a set of tactics, such as foot patrol, but
also a process by which police partner with communities.) Indeed, the
growing body of experience with and research on community policing is
remarkably congruent with the findings on effective governing institutions
in Indian Country. Community policing gives rise to law enforcement
institutions that have the characteristics cited above (self-determination
and cultural appropriateness) and such institutions have the potential to
substantially improve public safety. Seen in this light, community policing
provides a framework that tribes might use to design and implement
Native approaches to policing--approaches that should improve the quality
of policing in Indian Country and, rather than perpetuate an inappropriate
Federal structure, enhance tribal nation building.

Our earlier finding--that tribal citizens rely increasingly on their police
departments to settle disputes, conflicts, and problems that police
themselves do not consistently treat as legitimate crime problems--
reinforces the conclusion. The overarching lesson of community policing
is that if reservation police were to pay attention to these problems, and if
they were to use credible tribal approaches as remedies, they would
become more effective problem solvers, more respected by tribal citizens,
and better able to prevent problems that might otherwise escalate.

The first step in improving policing in Indian Country, therefore, is to
systematically link community values to departmental values and to
express these values in concrete operations. For any given Indian nation,
the systems that animate and guide policing--such as the organizational
structures of the police department, tribal personnel and training systems,
local management information and control systems, and departmental
policies and procedures--can be linked to a vision of policing shaped by
that nation's beliefs, priorities, and resources. The policies and procedures
for dispatch offer a useful, concrete example of this nuts-and-bolts linkage
between policing systems and tribal priorities. Depending on a dispatcher's
assessment of a call, a local elder could accompany a responding officer;
in many instances, the officer might be there only to support the elder's
authority (or vice versa). Such an effort would lend credibility to the
modern police function while showing respect for important tribal
traditions.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Tribes, with the support of the Federal Government, must reconsider the
foundations of policing on American Indian reservations. The lessons
drawn by tribes, academics, and policymakers from the research on and
accumulating experience in community policing and the design of
effective governing institutions in Indian Country provide the necessary
starting points for tribes as they rethink policing. The same evidence and
experience can productively inform the development of Federal policy.
Significantly, we do not recommend that policymakers direct their full
attention and resources to increasing funding for reservation police
departments, developing specialized crime-fighting task forces, and
improving technology. Without the core investment in "rethinking
policing" that we describe, these efforts do not do enough to help Indian
police departments and tribal communities address the problems they face.
Similarly, we are not recommending that tribes reflexively resurrect
dormant prereservation methods of social control and policing, nor are we
giving a blanket endorsement to restorative justice. The challenge is to
create workable, nation-specific policing institutions and approaches
informed by traditional customs--because they lay the best foundation for
improving safety, preventing crime, and promoting the practice of
effective policing in Indian Country.

Note

1. These rates were calculated from 1996 data found in table 1.28 (p. 39)
and table 3.118 (pp. 276-281).

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Executive Summary

Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview
Study Goals
Organization of the Report
Overview of Conclusions and Recommendations

Chapter 2. Policing in Indian Country: The Context
What Is "Indian Country"?
Whom Do Police in Indian Country Serve?
Who Polices Indian Country?
The Criminal Justice System in Indian Country
Summary

Chapter 3. Crime Trends in Indian Country
The Limitations of Indian Country Crime Data
The Prevalence, Distribution, and Character of Crime on American Indian
Reservations

Chapter 4. Organization and Management of Police Departments in Indian
Country
Characteristics of Departments Serving Indian Country
A Closer Look at Four Indian Police Departments
Conclusions

Chapter 5. Federal Policy and Policing in Indian Country
The History of Reservation Policing
The Contemporary Problem
Research on Effective Governing Institutions in Indian Country

Chapter 6. Conclusions and Recommendations
Reprise of Research on Effective Governing Institutions
The Possibilities for Community Policing in Indian Country
What the Federal Government Can Do
What Tribes Can Do
Conclusion

References

Appendix A. Study Methodology

Appendix B. Survey Respondents and Questionnaires

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Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview

Study Goals

This study had two principal goals. The first was to take a broad look at
policing in Indian Country to better understand the many arrangements for
administering reservation police departments, develop an initial
assessment of the challenges facing Indian policing, and identify policing
approaches that might be successful in responding to the growing crime
problem in Indian Country. The task was complex, especially because the
research literature on policing in Indian Country is limited and the variety
of policing arrangements and communities served is considerable. More
than 200 police departments serve an even larger number of tribal
communities. Most departments are administered by tribes, but some are
administered by the Federal Government and some by State and local
governments. They range in size from only 2 or 3 officers to more than
200 officers. The communities they serve are as small as the Grand
Canyon-based Havasupai Tribe (with a population of only 600) and the
Puyallup Tribe (whose 104-acre reservation is part of greater Tacoma,
Washington) and as large as the Navajo Nation (with a population of more
than 250,000 and a land area larger than the State of Connecticut).

Our second goal was to evaluate the prospects for community policing in
Indian Country. Could this strategy, which grew out of the experience of
police departments in urban settings, be usefully applied to the strikingly
different cultural, geographic, and demographic features typical of Indian
reservations? Despite their differences, both urban areas and Indian
nations face the task of building local capacity to address severe social and
economic problems. To the extent that community policing provides an
opportunity for communities to develop and employ their own resources,
priorities, and values in the service of public safety, it might also help
tribes solve their own problems. Therefore, we sought to understand
whether some form of community policing might be appropriate in Indian
Country.

This was an exploratory study. It represents a first effort at characterizing
the variety of arrangements for policing in Indian Country, while trying to
gain an indepth understanding of the operations of a limited set of
representative departments and their tribal contexts. This suggests a third
goal: identifying important topics for further research. Given the limited
research on policing in Indian Country, the variety of policing
arrangements, and the considerable cultural and socioeconomic diversity
across tribes, this study can offer only a limited understanding of the
dynamics influencing the performance of police departments that serve
reservation communities. For example, such topics as law enforcement
under Public Law 83-280 (PL 83-280) and the complex problems of
criminal jurisdiction and interagency cooperation require separate
treatment; these important issues merit comprehensive research. Our
primary intent is to provide useful data and guidance to police,
policymakers, and tribal leaders. Therefore, this Research Report attempts
to balance recommendations for further research with recommendations
for near-term actions to address the most pressing concerns.

A brief description of the study components can be found in the sidebar
"Study Methodology." Appendix A contains a detailed description of the
methodology.

Organization of the Report

This Research Report proceeds in four steps. First we develop the context
of policing in Indian Country by introducing the wide variety of socio-
economic, cultural, and political conditions that characterize Indian
Country and by offering a brief overview of the typical Indian police
department. Defining the context in both these ways helps to focus our
analysis and our recommendations. Next we describe the crime problems
to which these departments must respond, prefacing this description with a
discussion of the difficulties in obtaining reliable and useful crime data
from Indian Country.

Our third step is to address problems of organization and management,
beginning with a description of the range of departments in Indian Country
and data on reporting structures, staffing, and funding. Specific examples
from our site visits give a fuller picture of the primary management
challenges that reservation police departments face. The severity of these
challenges leads us to consider whether the resource constraints we found
adequately explain the problems with policing. Finally, to better
understand the problems faced by police departments and the tribal
communities they serve, we look to the history of reservation policing and,
in particular, to the impact of Federal policy.

Overview of Conclusions and Recommendations

A central conclusion of this analysis is that Federal policy has failed to
promote the ability of Indian nations to design and exert meaningful
control over their own policing institutions. Findings from research in
Indian Country on the characteristics of effective governing institutions
highlight this problem. The research indicates that governing institutions
are more effective when they are self-determined and when they reflect, in
a functionally meaningful way, a tribe's underlying cultural norms and
values (Cornell and Kalt 1995, 1998). Research and experience in
community policing are congruent with these findings. The community
policing strategy, which involves embedding community priorities and
values in the overall function of the police enterprise, enhances the
capacity of police to assist communities (Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy
1990; Kelling and Moore 1988). Together, the findings suggest that
pursuing such a strategy would enable Indian communities to lend their
authority to the police enterprise, see their norms and values (their culture)
reflected in the police mission, employ their considerable formal and
informal resources to address crime, and develop more effective policing
institutions overall.

The first step in improving policing in Indian Country, therefore, is to
systematically link community values to departmental values and express
these values in concrete operations. For any Indian nation, the systems that
animate and guide policing--such as the policies and procedures of the
police department, the organizational structures of the police department
and overall criminal justice system, the tribal personnel and training
systems, the local management information and control systems, and the
tribal agencies that conduct strategic planning--can be linked to a vision of
policing shaped by that nation's priorities, resources, and needs. These
conclusions and recommendations do not address the full range of
problems faced by Indian policing. Instead, they focus on a fundamental
issue: The tribes, with the support of the Federal Government, must
reconsider the foundations of policing on American Indian reservations. 

Policing in many parts of Indian Country occurs in an environment
characterized by serious crime and deteriorating social conditions, a
situation that has drawn the attention of politicians, police executives,
tribal leaders, and researchers and that suggests that investments in
improving policing are urgently needed. The heightened attention and
concern are welcome. Policymakers are now thinking harder about how to
protect tribal communities from crime and how to better support the
efforts of tribal criminal justice agencies. But the very urgency to address
violence, gangs, drug-related crime, and substance abuse in Indian
Country may have a downside. It may push too quickly toward the
conclusion that addressing the problems is simply a matter of obtaining
better data on crime, increasing funding, and improving police
management. However, these improvements alone are likely to have a
limited effect on the ability of tribal communities and the police
departments that serve them to independently address the substantial
problems they face. Although our research indicates that these inputs are
important, it also shows that they do not address the issue most central to
effective policing in Indian Country: the challenge of designing Indian
police departments as core institutions of tribal government. Thus, we
believe that the first priority both for tribal leaders and communities and
for law enforcement professionals, politicians, policymakers, and
researchers should be to work together to rethink policing in Indian
Country. Addressing the fundamental questions of policing will enable
them to better understand the situation and develop the kinds of
investments (e.g., data, money, technology, technical assistance) that will
best serve efforts to improve policing.

------------------------------

Chapter 2. Policing in Indian Country: The Context

What is Indian Country, and what do we mean when we refer to Indian
reservations and Indian nations? Whom do police in Indian Country serve?
What does the typical police department in Indian Country look like
(especially, who polices Indian Country)? And finally, what are the basics
of the criminal justice system in Indian Country? This section sets the
scene for the discussions that follow.

What Is "Indian Country"?

"Indian Country" comprises the 56 million acres of land owned by Indian
communities in the United States.[1] According to the BIA (1998a) there
are more than 330 federally recognized Indian tribes in the lower 48
United States. Nearly all tribes have reservations, which are lands the
United States "reserved for" tribes in treaties, statutes, or executive orders
during the Euro-American western expansion of the 18th, 19th, and 20th
centuries (BIA 1998b). Most of Indian Country is located west of the
Mississippi River, but it also includes a number of reservations belonging
to tribes in the East. Overall, Indians live on reservations in 34 continental
States, and all reservations have some form of policing arrangement (BIA
1998b; Bureau of the Census 1993).

Increasingly, tribes are referred to as "nations" to acknowledge their
distinct political status vis-a-vis the U.S. Federal and State governments:
Indian governments are not part of the Federal hierarchy but, instead, have
a government-to-government relationship with the United States (Reno
1995). Under this arrangement, American Indians hold dual citizenship as
citizens of both the United States and their Native nation. Because
limitations on tribal authority do exist (for example, tribes do not float
their own currencies or provide for their own defense), it may be more
accurate to describe Indian nations as semisovereign, or "domestic
dependent nations," as Chief Justice Marshall did in Cherokee Nation v.
Georgia (30 U.S. (5 Pet.)1(1831)). Yet, while tribes control a narrower
scope of policy than do such nations as Germany and Brazil, they have
significantly more scope for policymaking than cities or even U.S. States.
Indian nations adopt constitutions for their societies, write civil laws to
regulate conduct and commerce within their territorial boundaries, and
enforce those laws with their own judicial systems. In brief, modern tribes
exercise substantial, but not complete, rights of self-determination and
self-government.

Whom Do Police in Indian Country Serve?

In 1995, the BIA estimated a non-Alaska service population (the number
of Natives living on or very near reservations) of 1.1 million. Other
estimates are higher. Using data from the 1990 census and a historical
growth factor, the Indian Health Service (1997) estimated a 1996 non-
Alaska service population of more than 1.3 million, which would rise by
more than 100,000 by the year 2000. These differences reflect difficulties
in enumerating the reservation-based Indian population, the high birth
rates that are typical on many reservations, and in some cases, in-
migration.

Improved economic opportunities are the primary cause of in-migration in
the Indian communities where it is occurring, but such positive economic
changes are the exception rather than the rule. In particular, the perception
that Native Americans are generally enjoying increased prosperity as a
result of the growth of the gaming industry is mistaken. According to the
Government Accounting Office (1997), almost half of all gaming revenues
earned in 1995 were generated by only 8 of the 184 gaming tribes. Thus,
despite new tribal opportunities and ventures, American Indians remain
the poorest minority in the United States. Those living in reservation
communities, commonly characterized by severe unemployment
(sometimes reaching 80 to 90 percent[2]) and the attendant social and
economic symptoms of poverty, are the worst off of all (see, for example,
Kilborn 1992).

Important education and health outcomes also are poor. For example, as of
1990, the high school completion rate among reservation-resident Natives
age 25 and over was 54 percent; the national rate for all races was 78
percent (Bureau of the Census 1993, 312, table 7; 1998, 158, table 243).
Rates of alcoholism among American Indians are extraordinarily high, and
even higher than for other minorities, who are themselves at increased risk
of alcohol abuse (see, for example, Greenfeld 1998). Consequently, the
rates among Natives of alcohol-related health problems--chronic liver
disease, cirrhosis, fetal alcohol syndrome--are much higher than for other
population groups. Indexes of social dysfunction, such as suicide and
homicide, are also much higher than for either the general population or
other minority populations; for instance, the suicide rate is almost triple
that of the general population (Indian Health Service 1997).

Even so, many Indian nations are experiencing significant countertrends.
For example, through aggressive economic development and effective
governance, unemployment among the Mississippi Choctaw fell from 80
percent in the early 1980s to virtually zero in 1996; average family income
increased approximately sevenfold, to $22,000, during the same period
(Bordewich 1996). The Gila River Indian Community was able to provide
funding to more than 200 college students in the late 1990s, as opposed to
only a handful earlier in the decade. This support will dramatically
increase the percentage of community members who are recorded as
college graduates in the next census.[3] In sum, Indian Country comprises
a striking variety of economic and social conditions and characteristics.

An important additional type of variation is the substantial cultural
diversity found among American Indian communities. Although
"American Indian" is a single race category on the U.S. Census, this
grouping hides the fact that members of one tribe can be as different from
members of another tribe as citizens of Greece are from citizens of
Vietnam. Certainly, tribes' geographic dispersion is one source of
diversity. Peoples sharing similar natural surroundings developed
somewhat similar cultures and related languages; tribal subgroups then
refined the common culture in distinct ways, which gave rise to a wide
variety of cultures throughout Indian Country. One rough categorization of
these differences separates the Indians of the continental United States into
five cultural-geographic groups:

 o Farmers of the eastern forests.

 o Nomadic hunters of the plains and prairies.

 o Farmers and herders of the Southwest.

 o Seed gatherers of California and the intermountain Great Basin.

 o Ocean and river fishermen of the Northwest (Driver 1969; Waldman
1985).

Another method for classifying Native Americans' cultural diversity is
based on language. Early studies found more than 70 distinct linguistic
families and isolates among some 250 North American Indian languages.
However, with the extinction of some languages and reclassification of
others, linguists now group most extant North American Indian languages
into six primary families:

 o Eskimo and Aleut (Far North).

 o Algonquian (various tribes in the eastern forests, the Plains, and the Far
West).

 o Athabascan and related languages (the Mackenzie-Yukon Basin, the
Navajos in the Southwest, and some West Coast peoples).

 o Uto-Aztecan and related languages (the Great Basin and Rocky
Mountains area, the Plains, and the majority of the Pueblos).

 o Chinookan and related languages (several scattered Far Western tribes).

 o Siouan and related languages (people in such disparate regions as the
Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, New Mexico, and northern
California).[4]

Languages within the six families display linguistic similarities, but in
practice they are mutually unintelligible, a fact that reinforces cultural
differences. Despite decades of suppression and English assimilation,
Native language use may now be on the upswing.[5] Thus, the
extraordinary cultural variation among historical Indian nations is, and
should continue to be, an important distinguishing factor among modern
Indian nations.

Finally, the history and politics of place also contribute to distinct cultural
identities. As reservations were created, members of several indigenous
groups were sometimes assigned to one locality; conversely, members of
some large indigenous groups were located on several land bases. Over
time, the people of each reservation experienced unique struggles. These
historical, geographical, and cultural-linguistic differences together
support the proposition that the resident community of each of these 330-
plus, unique "nations" is the most appropriate group to undertake
policymaking and problem solving.

Who Polices Indian Country?

The array of administrative arrangements for policing in Indian Country is
complex (see exhibit 1). Members of the police departments that serve
reservation communities may be tribal, Federal, State, county, or
municipal employees.

Tribal or Public Law 93-638 Policing

The most common administrative arrangement is for police departments to
be organized under the auspices of the Indian Self-Determination and
Education Assistance Act of 1975. Also known as Public Law 93-638 (PL
93-638), this law gives tribes the opportunity to assume responsibility for
many programs previously administered by the Federal Government by
contracting with the BIA (Canby 1998, 30-31). Thus, these police
departments are administered by tribes under contract with the BIA
Division of Law Enforcement Services. Typically, a 638 contract
establishes the department's organizational framework and performance
standards and provides basic funding for the police function. Officers and
nonsworn staff of 638 contract departments are tribal employees.

Tribes have used the Self-Determination Act quite aggressively to acquire
increased control of their police departments. In 1995, for example, 88
departments (nearly half of the non-Public Law 83-280 tribes) were
administered under the auspices of PL 93-638.

BIA Administration

Departments administered by the BIA are the second most common type
of police department in Indian Country. Staff in these departments are
Federal employees and are part of a national, BIA-employed hierarchy of
law enforcement officers. For many years, patrol officers were under the
line authority of the local BIA superintendent (each reservation has a BIA
superintendent who oversees all or most BIA functions on that
reservation), and criminal investigators were under the line authority of the
BIA Division of Law Enforcement Services. Recent changes have placed
line authority for patrol under the BIA Division of Law Enforcement
Services as well.

In 1995, 64 departments (slightly more than one-third of the non-PL 83-
280 tribes) were administered by the BIA.

Self-Governance Policing and Tribally Funded Departments

By far less common than the types described above, but significant
nevertheless, are departments that receive funding under the auspices of
the self-governance amendments to Public Law 93-638 and departments
that receive complete funding from tribal coffers.

Like tribes with 638ed police departments, tribes with self-governance
arrangements contract (except in this case, the terminology is to
"compact") with the BIA to assume responsibility for law enforcement
services that might otherwise be performed by the BIA. The primary
difference between contracting under PL 93-638 and compacting under its
self-governance amendments is that financing is through a block grant,
rather than as payment for budgeted line items. These contractual
requirements and funding mechanisms grant tribes much more control
over government functions than is permitted under 638 contracts. In 1995,
22 Indian police departments (approximately 12 percent of the non-PL 83-
280 tribes) were administered through self-governance.

Although tribes achieve a high degree of organizational freedom through
self-governance compacts, tribes that fully fund their own police
departments gain near-complete tribal control of their law enforcement
institutions. Given resource constraints in Indian Country, however, only
four of the non-PL 83-280 tribes had tribally funded departments in 1995.

Public Law 83-280 Policing

A number of tribes rely on State and local authorities for police services
under Public Law 83-280, 67 Stat. 588 (1953). This law, passed as part of
a larger effort to "terminate" American Indian tribes, gave California,
Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Wisconsin, and (later) Alaska the power to
enforce the same criminal laws within Indian Country as they did outside
of Indian Country. The law also "provided that any other state could
assume such jurisdiction by statute or state constitutional amendment,"
and many did so (Canby 1998, 27; Barker 1998, 46-49). With the advent
of the Federal policy of self-determination in the 1970s, some States
retroceded policing responsibility back to tribes. Nonetheless, a significant
number of Indian communities still rely on State and local police services,
which usually are paid for by the surrounding, and generally larger, non-
Indian community.

The number of tribes subject to policing through PL 83-280 is fairly static
and relatively large (for example, it includes many of the more than 100
tribes in California). We have excluded them from this study, which
focuses on tribes that either police themselves or have a present
opportunity to do so. Often, PL 83-280 tribes have rather small
populations or limited land bases, characteristics that make self-policing
much more difficult. We agree with other researchers, however, that,
despite these constraints, PL 83-280 tribes should have an opportunity to
determine the policing arrangement that best serves their members
(Goldberg and Singleton 1998). The complexity of these issues merits
separate, comprehensive treatment.

Other Administrative Arrangements

To this already complicated picture, we must add several more
possibilities. First, tribes can contract with the BIA for individual police
functions. Therefore, some departments will have a tribal patrol function
and a BIA criminal investigation function. Second, an increasing number
of departments include both tribally employed and BIA-employed patrol
officers. The Community Oriented Policing Service (COPS) program[6] is
one driving force behind this mix. Its grants provide funding for new
local-level officers, who cannot be Federal employees. Thus, tribes that
receive COPS grants but have BIA-administered departments have had to
hire officers under tribal auspices.

The Typical Department in Indian Country

Despite the complexity of administrative arrangements, it is possible to
construct a rough portrait of the typical police department serving Indian
Country. This sketch is a step toward developing a general understanding
of the context of policing in Indian Country. The data for this portrait
come from the approximately 40 respondents to our survey of the 67
largest tribes (66 largest departments) located in the continental United
States.

The typical department is administered either by the tribe through a 638
contract or by the BIA. It has 32 employees (of whom approximately 9 are
civilians, 6 are detention officers, 16 are police officers, and 1 to 3 are
command staff). Given the around-the-clock nature of policing, the
numbers imply that the typical department has only a few officers on duty
at any one time. The sworn officers are high school graduates and
graduates of certified law enforcement training academies. A slight
majority are Native American.

The typical department polices a reservation land area of 500,000 acres
and serves approximately 10,000 tribal members.[7] Therefore, the typical
setting is a large land area with a relatively small population patrolled by a
small number of police officers, and the superficial description is of a rural
environment with rural-style policing. In fact, substantial numbers of
reservation residents live in fairly dense communities that share attributes
of suburban and urban areas. Nonetheless, the figures are roughly
equivalent to an area the size of Delaware, but with a population of only
10,000 that is patrolled by no more than three police officers (and as few
as one officer) at any one time--a level of police coverage that is much
lower than in other urban and rural areas of the country.

The typical department has an operating budget of approximately $1
million per year, which also is less than its rural counterparts and much
less than the typical urban police department. In keeping with this limited
resource base, the facilities and equipment that support such a department
are generally old: The department typically is housed in a building that is
20 or more years old and relies on a vehicle fleet that is at least 3 years
old.

The Criminal Justice System in Indian Country

The components of the criminal justice system in Indian Country are
similar to those of non-Indian communities throughout the country. The
primary components are the judiciary, the prosecutorial and defense bars,
the correctional system (including probation), and the police. However, the
complex jurisdictional arrangements in Indian Country mean that for
nearly every serious crime, the U.S. Attorney and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) have potential jurisdiction. This is markedly different
from the situation in non-Indian communities: On reservations, Federal
agencies play a potentially broad role in the operation of what is
essentially a local criminal justice system.

Although the arrangements may vary from reservation to reservation, three
factors always come into play in determining criminal jurisdiction in
Indian Country. These factors tend to narrow tribal jurisdiction and expand
either State or Federal jurisdiction over a wide range of crimes:

 o Where the crime was committed. Only crimes committed in Indian
Country, on trust land, fall under the jurisdiction of tribes. All crimes
committed outside of Indian Country, even if they involve American
Indians, fall under State or Federal jurisdiction.

 o Who committed the crime (Indian or non-Indian). For tribal jurisdiction,
the alleged offender must be an American Indian. Sometimes, however,
even Indians who are not members of the tribe on whose reservation the
crime occurred may be exempt from that tribe's jurisdiction. Regardless of
the nature of the crime or the location in which it occurred, non-Indians
are not under the criminal jurisdiction of tribes.

 o What crime was committed. As a result of the Major Crimes Act of
1885 (18 U.S.C.A. section 1153) and the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968
(25 U.S.C.A. section 1302(7)), tribes have jurisdiction only over less
serious crimes. Most serious crimes--including murder, manslaughter,
arson, burglary, and robbery--fall under the jurisdiction of Federal
authorities. However, some tribes have found ways to exercise increased
authority over the investigation and adjudication of more serious
crimes.[8]

Other attributes of the criminal justice system in Indian Country that often
are highlighted by experts in the field and are relevant to this discussion
include the following:

 o Like police departments in Indian Country, other Indian Country
criminal justice agencies suffer from major resource constraints (see
Odum 1991).

 o Indian Country has a greater representation of nonprofessionals in the
judiciary and the prosecution and defense bars than non-Indian
communities do (see Melton 1998).

 o Indian Country has a severe shortage of jail space and correctional
treatment programs, particularly with regard to substance abuse (Office of
the Inspector General 1996).

Summary

The context for policing in Indian Country can be summarized as follows:

 o The communities served are aptly described as nations, and these
nations exhibit an exceptionally wide variety of social, economic, and
cultural characteristics. Even so, most Indian nations face severe social
and economic problems.

 o Departments serving most residents of Indian Country are administered
either by the BIA or by tribes through a contractual arrangement with the
BIA.

 o Departments have limited resources with which to accomplish their
mission. This is exemplified by the typical department, which patrols a
large land area with a small number of police officers, works with older
equipment and facilities, and depends on a relatively small operating
budget.

 o The criminal justice system within which departments operate is similar
to that of non-Indian communities, except for the stricter limits on tribal
jurisdiction and the more prominent role of Federal agencies.

Notes

1. Indian Country was defined by the U.S. Congress in 1948 (18 U.S.C.A.
section 151) as "a) all land within the limits of any Indian reservation
under the jurisdiction of the United States government, notwithstanding
the issuance of any patent, and, including rights-of-way running through
the reservation, b) all dependent Indian communities within the borders of
the United States whether within the original or subsequently acquired
territory thereof, and whether within or without the limits of a state, and c)
all Indian allotments, the Indian titles to which have not been
extinguished, including rights-of-way running through the same." See
Canby (1998, 113-114).

2. See, for example, Bureau of Indian Affairs (1996). To be counted as
"unemployed" in BIA's calculation of the unemployment rate, an
individual must be seeking work. But given limited opportunities, many
reservation residents may have given up the search. A calculation that
includes these "discouraged workers" is probably more accurate than the
standard calculation of the employment rate, which leads to
unemployment estimates in the 80- to 90-percent range for some
reservation communities.

3. Personal interview with the Director of the Gila River Indian
Community Department of Education, October 29, 1998.

4. For example, see Driver (1969, 43-45), who bases his table on Voegelin
and Voegelin (1966).

5. The Native American Languages Acts of 1990 (PL 101-477) and 1992
(PL 102-254) are examples of the renewed interest in Native language.
These laws, which articulate a U.S. Government policy of protecting
indigenous languages, were passed at the express request of Native groups.

6. The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) in the
U.S. Department of Justice is "responsible for advancing community
policing, including the hiring of 100,000 additional community policing
officers" (quoted from the COPS Web page,
http://www.usdoj.gov/cops/gpa/default.htm).

7. The average acreage calculation--based on survey data, not on the entire
universe of reservations--excludes the Navajo reservation, which is
atypically large. The average population estimate does not derive from
survey data, but rather, was reported to us by members of the Executive
Committee for Indian Country Law Enforcement Improvements. It may
substantially overestimate the actual number of tribal members served by
the typical department. Data from the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs Labor Force Survey, and the tribes themselves suggest that the
figure may be as low as 6,000. The simple and unfortunate fact is that data
on the Native population actually served by police in Indian Country are
of limited reliability. Indeed, the range of difference reported here suggests
that researchers and policymakers must be especially wary of "per capita"
estimates (for example, policing resources per tribal member served) and
of policy recommendations that depend heavily on these figures; they can
be made to say many things. This issue is discussed in greater detail in
chapter 4.

8. For example, tribal police and prosecutors sometimes charge alleged
criminals with misdemeanors (over which Indian nations have
jurisdiction) in addition to (or instead of) felonies (over which Indian
nations do not have jurisdiction); this allows the community to keep the
alleged criminal within the tribal system or seek some remedy, even when
the Federal system is too overburdened to pursue prosecution.

------------------------------

Chapter 3. Crime Trends in Indian Country

The Limitations of Indian Country Crime Data

General Remarks

In recent years, policymakers and law enforcement professionals have
become increasingly concerned that crime, particularly violent crime, is
increasing rapidly on American Indian reservations. (See, for example,
Claiborne 1998; Executive Committee for Indian Country Law
Improvements 1997; Mydans 1995; and "Why Does Violent Crime on
Indian Lands Soar" 1997.) The problem is all the more worrisome because
we know far less than we would like about crime in Indian Country (on
the tribal, regional, and national levels) (Executive Committee 1997; Clark
1996b). Broadly, the lack of accurate data on crime in Indian Country can
be attributed to the underreporting of crime. More specific reasons for the
lack of accurate crime data include issues of culture, geography, and
economics unique to American Indian reservations; the limited
administrative and technological resources available to tribal police
departments; inadequate coordination between tribal and Federal agencies;
and management problems common to both tribal and BIA police
departments.[1] Furthermore, even when it is possible to obtain accurate
tribal-level data, multiple complex factors cause the prevalence and
character of crime to vary widely from reservation to reservation, a fact
that strongly cautions against using data from a few tribes as a basis for
projecting overall trends. For example, during 1995 at least 15 homicides
occurred on the Gila River reservation, a community with a robust
economy and a population of approximately 10,000 (Clark 1996b). In
contrast, the Oglala Sioux--a much larger tribe (40,000) that is plagued
with serious social problems and a struggling economy--had only one
homicide during a similar period. Equally dramatic contrasts can be found
throughout Indian Country.

Policymakers and law enforcement professionals frequently focus on the
obstacles to formulating effective anticrime strategies (Luna 1998). While
the information is useful, this focus tends to obscure much that is known
about crime and its context in Indian Country--information that might be
immediately useful to policymakers, law enforcement professionals, and
tribal leadership. Therefore, although this report discusses the factors
contributing to a lack of accurate data on crime in Indian Country, it also
draws attention to what is known and what that information suggests about
the strategies available for addressing crime on American Indian
reservations.

Reasons for Poor Crime Data in Indian Country

The underreporting of crime on reservations occurs on two levels: between
reservation citizens and their police agencies and between these tribal-
level police agencies and such Federal agencies as the FBI and the BIA.
On the first level, underreporting is attributable to cultural and
demographic factors that are highly characteristic of Indian Country. The
extensive research literature on underreporting of crime cites distrust of
police, the shame or humiliation associated with certain kinds of crime,
and fear of retaliation as strong predictors of underreporting (Skogan
1977; Wasserman 1998). These factors are unusually common in Native
American communities. In many, there is a longstanding distrust of law
enforcement authorities. On social, cultural, and even political levels, the
issues of shame and fear of retaliation are also present. Tribal members
underreport because of the shame associated with such crimes as child
abuse, child neglect, and domestic violence; because of their fear that the
(typically) small, intimate reservation community will be unable to protect
those who report such crimes; and because close and complicated family
and clan relationships among victims, offenders, and police officers
discourage reporting.[2]

Unfortunately, these causes of underreporting of crime are exacerbated by
other characteristics of reservation life (see Silverman 1996). For example,
geographic isolation from police departments and from tribal social
service agencies heightens the fear of retaliation that victims of family
violence may have and further discourages reporting. On some
reservations, this fear is increased even more by a lack of ready access to
telephone service in isolated or poor villages. Data from the 1990 Census
show that "the majority of American Indian homes on reservations (53
percent) did not have a telephone." By comparison, only 9 percent of
nonmetropolitan households in the U.S. population overall did not have a
phone (Bureau of the Census 1995, 1). Finally, in those tribes where
traditional means of dispute resolution and social norm enforcement have
declined, but where new methods--like police intervention--are not readily
available or are not viewed as legitimate or effective by the tribal
community, many crimes may never come to the attention of police
authorities.[3]

The second level at which underreporting occurs originates with
reservation police departments. Even if citizens report crimes or crimes are
otherwise made known to police departments, data are either not collected
or not forwarded to Federal agencies. Four problems, most of which are
associated with the small size of typical police departments in Indian
Country, play the greatest role in this level of underreporting: staff
shortages and time constraints, limited data-collection capacities,
competing Federal and local priorities, and problems with department
administration and management.

Because the small size of police departments in Indian Country places
time constraints on staff, data collection is extremely expensive relative to
the overall budget of the department. Police officers and other staff in the
departments we visited referred to themselves as generalists and
commented that the time needed for specialized administrative tasks
competes with, and often loses out to, fighting crime and providing
emergency services. When police officers also must serve as jail staff, as is
the case in approximately 50 percent of all departments surveyed, their
time is stretched even further. Simply put, because these small
departments cannot afford to dedicate staff to any specialized function, the
cost of data collection and analysis is much greater than it is for larger
departments.

Small departments serving small communities often lack systematic
methods for collecting and analyzing crime data. Like other observers, we
found that many Indian Country police departments do not have
automated call management (i.e., 911 systems) and data collection and
analysis systems; survey results suggest that approximately half of the
departments lack them. In several tribes we visited, data regarding crime
reports and arrests could be collected only by reviewing handwritten
records, and even this level of effort was not always possible, because
written records were not consistently maintained. There seem to be two
reasons for the limited amount of automation--Indian police departments'
scant resources, which have made the purchase of such systems
prohibitively expensive, and the small size of typical reservation
communities, which for many years did not require sophisticated call and
data management capacity for adequate policing. As tribal populations and
crime both increased,[4] Indian police departments suddenly found
themselves far behind their larger, urban counterparts (and somewhat
behind their comparable rural counterparts) in building such systems.[5]
An additional complication, related to the problem above, is that even
some departments with automated systems for data collection and analysis
cannot maximize the benefits of these systems, since the departments do
not have staff trained to use them to their full advantage.

Even when data are collected, the reporting of data (and the referral of
cases) by tribal departments to Federal agencies has been problematic. As
recently as 1996, for example, one northern plains tribe reported no major
crimes of any kind to Federal officials for several months--a precipitous
and unlikely decrease over the previous period.[6] In large part, the
problem arises because of competing local and Federal priorities, which
means that individual Indian police departments have little or no incentive
to report data on major felonies. Because the communities they police tend
to be small and highly interconnected, officers already have a good sense
of the prevalence of serious crimes, and it is difficult for them to see how
an official compilation of data would provide any better information.
Because Indian police officers spend so much more time on routine patrol
activities than they do on the crimes covered by Federal reporting
requirements, reporting may appear fairly unimportant to them. And, if
tribal police think that Federal agencies give low priority to the
prosecution of crimes that occur on reservations, they may believe that
reporting serves no purpose.[7] Unfortunately, while the impact on
individual tribes may be negligible, the failure to report or refer these
serious crimes has important implications for understanding the
prevalence and distribution of crime on regional and national levels. Such
data might be very useful, for example, in understanding crime on
reservations close to urban areas or near international borders where the
illegal activity associated with urban gangs, drug trafficking, and illegal
immigration might follow significant regional or national patterns.[8]

Problems with department administration and management also stymie the
collection and reporting of reservation crime data. Chapter 4 discusses
these issues, but one example can illustrate how such problems (striking in
their triviality but alarming in their frequency) work against the efficient
collection of useful crime data. In this case, the many police districts in the
department of a large plains tribe were required to submit incident report
records to the department headquarters on a fixed date each month.
Districts were notoriously late with their submissions, but the response
was neither to modify deadlines nor to work with districts to improve
reporting. Instead, late information was simply discarded.[9] As a result,
this information was unavailable to the tribe and to Federal agencies for
purposes of planning and management.

The Prevalence, Distribution, and Character of Crime on American Indian
Reservations

Given the above constraints on developing a detailed, accurate analysis of
crime trends, this section describes what the general prevalence,
distribution, and character of crime on reservations suggest about the
evolving role of police in Indian Country. Three factors appear most
important.

First, although it is difficult to accurately describe crime trends in Indian
Country, the overall workload of police departments in Indian Country has
been increasing at a significant rate. In other words, the intensity and range
of problems to which police departments in Indian Country must respond
appear to be increasing.

Second, many Native reservation residents live in rural, isolated areas and
the resources and technologies available to effectively police these areas
are in short supply. These conditions tend to obscure the fact that many
other Native reservation residents have settled in semiurban communities
and much, if not most, crime on reservations occurs in these fairly dense
communities. Crime in these areas may be amenable to well-developed,
tested strategies adapted from urban contexts.

Third, notwithstanding the recent reports of dramatic increases in violent
crime on reservations, especially among youth, the crimes that most
occupy police in Indian Country (as measured by calls for service, incident
reports, and arrests) are directly or indirectly related to alcohol abuse.
Alcohol-related crime is a deep and complex problem that--in contrast to
the problem of violent crime--has received insufficient attention.

The Increasing Workload of Police Departments in Indian Country

The workload of police departments in Indian Country is increasing at a
significant rate. General evidence of this trend comes from our survey
data, brief site visits, and four intensive site visits. Specific evidence is
given in exhibits 2-5, which approximate the increase in calls for service,
incident reports, and arrests from the Tohono O'odham Nation, the Three
Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, and the Confederated
Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. The Tohono
O'odham data (exhibits 2 and 3) show an average annual increase between
1994 and 1996 of more than 20 percent in incident reports and nearly 30
percent in arrests. During that period, not only the overall pressure on the
department increased, but also the workload of individual officers because
the number of sworn officers remained relatively constant. The Three
Affiliated Tribes' data (exhibit 4) show an average annual increase in
arrests of more than 30 percent between 1992 and 1994.

As at Tohono O'odham, this led to an increased demand for service from
individual officers, since the increase in calls for service and arrests
outpaced the expansion of the Fort Berthold department staff.[10] The
Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' data (exhibit 5) show an average
annual increase of 15 percent in calls for service and 45 percent in cited
offenses from fiscal year 1992 to fiscal year 1996. Several new officers
were hired in fiscal year 1995, but again, not in proportion to the
additional workload.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that these workload increases are partly due
to increases in serious crime and emergencies on reservations. But other
simple explanations should not be overlooked. For example, unlike many
smaller Indian police departments, the Tohono O'odham department has a
911 system; the community's growing reliance on 911 is a strong
contributing factor to the increase in calls for service. These systems may
be a broader cause of the increased workload we observed across Indian
Country. As Indian police departments implement automated call
management, they may be experiencing the surge in high-priority calls and
heightened demand that urban departments experienced when they
established 911 systems (Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy 1990). For the
Confederated Salish and Kootenai department, the large increase in
demand from fiscal year 1994 to 1995 occurred as a result of
"retrocession," by which the State of Montana ceded control over
reservation policing to the tribe. (This change is discussed in greater depth
in chapter 4.) While this was a fairly dramatic increase in tribal control, in
which a tribe subject to the authority of PL 83-280 regained its former
rights, other Indian nations also are increasing their jurisdictional sweep,
largely through cross-deputization agreements. Thus, another simple cause
of Indian police departments' increased workload is increased authority
over the offenses committed within reservation boundaries.

Yet, there is good reason to believe that the increased workload in Indian
police departments is not simply the result of rising serious crime and
emergencies, the greater availability of 911 services, or expanded
jurisdictional rights. It also appears that communities are placing new
demands on police departments to respond more frequently and more
rapidly to a broad range of problems. Many researchers have asserted that
tribal communities have become less and less reliant on traditional
methods of problem or conflict resolution and more reliant on the police
(for example, Nielsen 1996; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
1996). Our observations support this conclusion. For example, at Tohono
O'odham, not only has the demand for police services increased, but, in
recent years, there has also been a steady increase in the tribal advocates'
caseloads;[11] by 1996, each of the 10 advocates handled approximately
500 cases per year, an estimate that does not include the cases handled by
private attorneys and other legal services providers on the reservation.
Similarly, defense advocates at Gila River reported that they stopped
accepting traffic cases (misdemeanor violations of tribal traffic laws) in
the early 1990s because so many more serious cases filled their dockets.

The Geographic Distribution of Reservation Crime

The argument is often made that the unique demographics and geography
of Indian Country require uniquely rural approaches to crime prevention
and control. In general, however, researchers and police professionals have
found that such strategies are not as well developed as those for urban
areas (Weisheit, Wells, and Falcone 1995). Most rural strategies leave
unsolved the problem of how to provide adequate police coverage to
widely spread communities (for example, Cordner 1994). Police
professionals in Indian Country often describe how a single call from an
outlying area of a large reservation can take an officer out of service for
several hours, perhaps even a full day. That creates a serious coverage
problem for departments in which only one to three officers are on duty at
any one time.

Conversely, it is often underemphasized that while many reservation
residents live in isolated rural areas, a significant number have settled in
semiurban townships and villages, and much, if not most, crime on
reservations occurs in these more densely populated areas. At Tohono
O'odham, for example, half of the reservation's population of 14,000 lives
in Sells, Arizona, but considerably more than 50 percent of the incidents
that officers initiated or responded to in 1995 and 1996 took place there. In
addition, officers estimated that of these calls, the majority originated in
two relatively small U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) neighborhoods known as the "rentals," while another 18 percent
originated in a small urban area near the city of Tucson. At Fort Berthold,
approximately 1,500 of the almost 2,000 arrests made by the police
department in 1994 were made in the relatively densely populated New
Town district, an area that is home to 50 percent of the reservation's total
population. Gila River police officers also identified the HUD rental
developments in Sacaton and St. Johns as high-crime/frequent-call areas,
and officers at Flathead identified a crowded trailer park in one small
reservation town as a particularly troublesome site. In such areas, police
quite possibly could use strategies developed for urban areas effectively
and efficiently.

In addition to their semiurban character, these neighborhoods exhibit
numerous and unmistakable signs of decay and abandonment that invite
crime (Wilson and Kelling 1982). This is not from the casual disorder that
may be a cultural variant and not necessarily a reliable indicator that an
area has in some significant way been abandoned by local residents and
authorities. As noted above, crime in the town of Sells on the Tohono
O'odham reservation and in the towns of Sacaton and St. Johns on the Gila
River reservation is most prevalent in rundown public housing areas that
share many attributes of urban public housing developments. At Tohono
O'odham, the rentals contrast dramatically with a nearby immaculate and
orderly village, Big Fields, in which very little crime occurs; tribal police
officers reported that they rarely patrol Big Fields, simply because crime is
so low there and, in any event, residents "look out for each other." In a
HUD housing development on the Flathead reservation, crime and
disorder dropped precipitously when residents mowed lawns, cleaned up
the neighborhood, and reported illegal or suspicious activities to police.
These results are similar to results in urban neighborhoods when residents
take an active stand against physical disorder, abandonment, and decay.
Again, strategies that have proven useful in urban areas also might be
applicable to dense reservation housing areas.

In sum, analysis of the geographic distribution of crime on reservations
suggests that useful means of addressing crime in urban areas--strategies
such as community policing, which have led to interventions like Boston's
Operation Ceasefire, and other fruitful problem-solving approaches, such
as those that have led to the eradication of open-air drug markets--are
underused or at least undertested in Indian Country. Indeed, such
approaches might have particular promise in reservation housing projects,
since their limited size and population might permit police to more easily
develop detailed and expert knowledge of key community characteristics,
which is vital for successful problem solving.

Alcohol-Related Crime in Indian Country

In spite of recent reports of dramatic increases in violent crime in Indian
Country, particularly youth violence (Clark 1996a; Goldblatt 1998;
Weyerman 1998),[12] the crimes that most occupy police in Indian
Country are directly or indirectly related to alcohol abuse (Gossage and
May 1998; Indian Health Service 1997). Identifying alcohol abuse as a
leading problem in Indian Country is not new, and the "finding" may
sound trite. But this conclusion was stated by tribal members, tribal
leaders, and tribal police officers, and we are simply reporting it here. In
particular, the conclusion that alcohol-related crime is the leading crime
problem in Indian Country is based on evidence from our surveys and site
visits. Across all survey responses, for example, the constellation of
crimes that were directly related to alcohol abuse (such as driving under
the influence (DUI), the sale of alcohol to minors, and drunk and
disorderly conduct) or were indirectly related to alcohol abuse (such as
domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and assault) constituted the
leading category of calls for service, incident reports, and arrests. Also, the
great majority of police officers and administrators, tribal leaders, and
community members who were interviewed cited alcohol abuse as the
single biggest challenge facing their departments and communities. The
commanding officer at Fort Berthold, for example, estimated that 90
percent of his department's calls for service were driven by some form of
alcohol abuse. Similarly, an acting commanding officer at Gila River
estimated that 98 percent of calls there were alcohol-related. While it did
not focus on reservation residents but on American Indians overall, a
recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) study provides additional
evidence of these claims. Analysis of victimization data shows that
"American Indian victims of violence were the most likely of all races of
victims to indicate that the offender committed the offense while
drinking." Also, "the 1997 arrest rate among American Indians for
alcohol-related offenses was more than double that found among all
races," although drug arrest rates were lower than average (Greenfeld and
Smith 1999, vi-vii).

Alcohol abuse is a difficult problem, and police involvement is only one
part of the solution to alcohol-related crime. Community members realize
this as well. For instance, the director of the Gila River Indian Community
Department of Social Services expressed a belief that a comprehensive
community strategy for combating alcohol abuse was the only way that
further inroads could be made against crime and other social problems
associated with alcohol abuse. Members of the Gila River Youth Council
reported that they helped found a local Boys and Girls Club so that young
children living in homes where alcohol abuse was common could have
more positive role models. In other words, tribal community leaders
acknowledge the need for broad-based and creative solutions.

Yet it is also the case that police departments in Indian Country are not
organized to deal most effectively with alcohol-related crime. For
example, although many departments have drug task forces, largely
funded through Federal programs, these focus on "harder" drugs than
alcohol. Among the Salish and Kootenai, for example, drug task force
officers focused on methamphetamine, which was being transported and
marketed via the reservation, but largely to non-Natives. Site visits found
no evidence of similar comprehensive planning and deterrence programs
that deal with alcohol-related crime. If such programs exist, they are rare.
Perhaps more so than other crime categories, alcohol-related crime reflects
an entire nexus of social problems and, as the director of social services at
Gila River attested, it requires broad solutions. However, at one site we
visited, when asked for directions to the Department of Social Services,
police department officials provided directions to a building that the
agency had not occupied for a year. The lack of basic connections to such
a vital partner as Social Services signals that the police are not organized
to respond to the dire problem of alcohol-related crime.

Notes

1. The problem of data collection with regard to criminal justice issues and
agencies in Indian Country is widely noted by researchers and
policymakers. See, for example, Elias (1998).

2. Many of these problems are not unique to Indian Country but are
common to the small, tightly knit communities of rural areas across the
country. See, for example, Weisheit, Wells, and Falcone (1995).

3. See Judicature 79(3)(1995), a special issue entitled "Indian Tribal
Courts and Justice," especially, Ada Pecos Melton, "Indigenous Justice
Systems and Tribal Society," 126-133.

4. We note again that tribal populations are growing at a much faster rate
than the overall U.S. population (see Indian Health Service 1997) and that
some reservation communities report the return of tribal members as a
result of improved economic opportunities. Some interviewees also
speculated that there was a relationship between return migration and
crime; they posited that, having lived away from the stabilizing influence
of culture and extended family, returning members had an increased
predisposition to crime.

5. Of course, the lack of automated call management and data collection
systems is not unique to Indian Country. Whether or not a police
department has such a system is determined to a significant degree by the
size and location (urban vs. rural) of the department. Virtually all the
departments serving U.S. cities of 50,000 or more have some kind of 911
system, but in 1993, only 70 percent of the departments serving
communities of fewer than 10,000 had one (or used an existing system in
partnership with a local law enforcement agency, such as a sheriff's
department or the State police), and that percentage decreases further with
the size of the community served. The situation is similar with regard to
computerized data management. While nearly all the departments in the
country that serve populations over 10,000 have a data management
system, in 1993 only 39 percent of the departments serving communities
smaller than 2,500 had one (Reaves 1996). In this context, the lack of 911
systems in Indian Country seems less dramatic, but the point remains that
without methods for systematically collecting and analyzing crime data,
Indian police departments will tend to underreport crime.

6. Interview with Ted Quasula, chief of the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Division of Law Enforcement Services, December 1997.

7. On the other hand, Federal agencies complain that tribes do not refer
cases in a timely manner (thus, evidence is not fresh and witnesses are
difficult to locate or their memory has faded) or that preliminary
preparation of the cases has not been adequate. Both the tribal and Federal
problems are widely reported. See, for example, the Native American
Subcommittee, House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee (1997).

8. These reporting problems exist not only between tribal and Federal law
enforcement agencies, but also between tribal criminal justice agencies.
For example, in several of the systems we studied in depth, the juvenile
division of the tribal courts compiled data on juvenile crime but did not
regularly pass it on to the tribal police department--either because the
police never asked for it or because the police department rarely used the
information for planning purposes.

9. Problems with this department were widely reported in Indian Country
Today. See, for example, Roach (1997) and Melmer and Roach (1997).
Also see the report by Naranjo et al. (1996).

10. Since 1996, both departments have significantly expanded, in part due
to COPS funding. While new staff have improved these departments'
response to the increased demand for police services, the rapid personnel
expansion has created significant organizational challenges. Furthermore,
the fact that COPS funding has a sunset clause means that many
departments in Indian Country will once again be vulnerable to this
increase in demand.

11. Tribal advocates provide free legal services to tribal members.

12. Also, the President's budget for fiscal year 1999 included specific
appropriations to combat crime on Indian lands: $51 million for "20 FBI
agents and 26 attorneys to enhance investigations and prosecutions by
attacking violent crime and gangs, establishing the Indian Tribal Courts
Program, and creating a New Drug Testing and Intervention Program"
(quoted from "DOJ Seeks 4.4% Raise for FY99" 1998).

------------------------------

Chapter 4. Organization and Management of Police Departments in Indian
Country

This section examines the ways in which police departments serving
American Indian reservations are organized and managed to respond to
crime. We begin by adding depth and detail to the description of police
departments provided in chapter 2, including a fuller account of their
budgetary resources. Then, using both the perspective provided by our
survey and specific data from the departments we studied intensively, we
examine the organization, strategic planning systems, organizational
technology, and personnel systems that Indian police departments employ
in their efforts to address crime. While we frequently allude to the ways
that the Federal and tribal governments support the police function, a more
comprehensive discussion of their roles is reserved for the next chapter.

Characteristics of Departments Serving Indian Country

Earlier, we presented a brief profile of the typical department to focus our
analysis and recommendations; we complete this picture with a description
of the variation found in the more than 200 tribally and BIA-administered
police departments in Indian Country. Luna offers a detailed statistical
profile of these departments; another is being developed by the COPS
office (Luna 1998; Luna and Walker 1998; Wood 1998). Therefore, while
we offer some basic statistics, this section focuses on the core management
challenges across the range. These management challenges are as follows:
size, administrative arrangements, staffing and personnel, facilities and
equipment, and funding.

Size

Small departments. These departments have at most nine officers, usually
fewer. While there are many more small departments (approximately 150)
than medium-sized or large departments, they serve substantially fewer
people: between 25 and 30 percent of the citizens served by BIA and
tribally administered police departments in Indian Country.

Among the most important problems facing small departments is the
challenge of providing daily, around-the-clock police coverage to their
communities. Rarely is more than one officer on duty at any time. As a
result, officers often work without adequate backup and common events
(such as an officer's illness or need to testify in court) can substantially
reduce or eliminate the availability of police services.

The officers working in small departments are true generalists, as they
work not only across different police functions but also in administrative
and support functions. They may serve as dispatchers, investigators, patrol
officers, detention officers, and custodians. During site visits, we even
observed patrol officers in these small departments preparing food for
detainees and sentenced inmates. In the not-so-distant past, tribal police
sometimes served as prosecutors.[1] Organizational charts for departments
of this size do not adequately reflect the variety and complexity of the
work their officers perform.

Medium departments. These departments have between 10 and 50 sworn
officers. There are more than 75 medium-sized police departments in
Indian Country, serving roughly 60 percent of the Native Americans living
in reservation communities subject to BIA or tribal policing. The typical
department we describe in chapter 2 is medium-sized and, therefore, gives
an apt indication of the management challenges these departments face.[2]

The key organizational attribute that distinguishes medium-sized
departments from small departments is that a minimum of one or two
officers are on duty at all times. That is, it is theoretically possible for
these departments to provide 24-hour police coverage, even though it may
be quite difficult in practical terms. At the low end of the size range, in
terms of the demands made on staff members to perform a wide range of
duties, the departments face challenges similar to those of the small
departments in Indian Country. At the high end of the size range, the
departments can support some specialized activities; not only are some
officers free to focus on standard patrol activities, but others may
specialize in such areas as gang violence, substance abuse, and domestic
violence. This transition may signal that there is a staffing level at which
specialization can enable a department to focus on critical strategic and
planning issues, a focus that is not possible if officers and command staff
must respond to a wide range of demands.

In recent years, many medium-sized departments have experienced
significant growth in staff, primarily through grants from the Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). For example, the Three
Affiliated Tribes department almost doubled in size. A few other tribes
have been able to augment police staffs with their own resources. One of
our site-visit tribes, the Gila River Indian Community, used gaming profits
to double the size of its patrol staff, from approximately 18 to 38 officers.

Large departments. These departments have more than 50 sworn officers.
The two largest departments in Indian Country--those of the Navajo
Nation and the Oglala Sioux Tribe--have 100 or more uniformed officers.
Together these two departments serve approximately 15 percent of the
nearly 1.4 million residents of Indian Country. The police functions of
both the Navajo Nation and the Oglala Sioux Tribe operate under a 638
contract.

The large departments feature levels of organizational complexity not
present in small and medium-sized departments. Increased specialization,
more elaborate (but not necessarily more efficient) oversight mechanisms,
and district-based organization are some of the factors that drive the
complexity. Surprisingly, however, some of the primary management
challenges that large departments face are similar to those in smaller
departments. For example, for many years, the Oglala Sioux Tribe's
Department of Public Safety (OSTDPS) had approximately 85 officers
spread over nine districts, and each district had its own local command
staff. While district-based organization had some positive aspects, it also
created a high ratio of command staff to sworn staff. As in small
departments, demands on OSTDPS's patrol staff to perform a wide range
of duties, many unrelated to the patrol function, were considerable.
Similarly, despite the overall size of the department, OSTDPS's district-
based organization presented a formidable challenge in providing adequate
police coverage over the entire expanse of the Pine Ridge reservation. In
recent years, challenges such as these, as well as the problems of
managing a large department in a large, highly politicized community,
have put tremendous pressure on the largest police departments in Indian
Country.

Administrative Arrangements

The two most common department types are those administered by the
BIA and those administered by tribes under 638 contracts. These
classifications appear straightforward, but the complexity of organizational
and administrative arrangements is significantly increased by the
following factors:

 o The variety of administrative arrangements for policing in Indian
Country. As discussed in chapter 2, 638 and BIA departments are only the
primary administrative possibilities.

 o The split in line authority for the investigative and patrol functions
between different divisions within the BIA. Until very recently, the BIA's
Law Enforcement Division, headquartered in Albuquerque, had line
authority for criminal investigation (that is, line authority was placed at the
national and regional levels), while BIA superintendents at the reservation
level had line authority over other police functions, including patrol,
dispatch, and detention (that is, line authority was placed at the local
level). In a handful of cases, one function was under a 638 contract and the
other was provided by the BIA.

 o The presence of both Federal and tribal sworn officers in many
departments administered by the BIA. In BIA departments, officers hired
by the BIA are Federal employees. However, many tribes have also hired
tribal officers to supplement the limited number of BIA positions.

Despite these factors, it is possible to describe the general reporting
arrangement between tribes and the departments that serve them. When
the department is administered by the BIA, the reporting relationship is
mediated by the BIA. That is, the BIA, not the tribe, has direct supervisory
responsibility over the department's executive. (In practical terms,
however, tribes wield considerable power over many decisions regarding
department policies.) When the tribe administers the department under a
638 contract, the reporting relationship between police departments and
the tribes they serve is not mediated by an outside party. This direct
supervision may be exercised in a variety of ways: Oversight might be
provided by tribal executives (variously known as tribal chairs, presidents,
and governors), by elected legislative committees, or by other appointed
bodies.

An often difficult oversight issue arises in departments that employ both
Federal and tribal officers.[3] The usual approach in these departments is
for tribally funded officers to be supervised by the BIA police department
command staff through a formal agreement with the tribe. Because of the
implications this arrangement has for department management, it should
not be regarded as a "paper" complexity. First, the dual authority structure
allows compensation, training, and equipment inequities, which are likely
to lead to personnel and management problems. In our survey, for
example, tribes frequently reported that the salary and benefit packages of
tribal officers tend to be less attractive than those of BIA officers, who, as
Federal employees, are eligible for more generous Federal packages.[4]
These differences may create an incentive system that results in a group of
officers with inferior capacities. When tribal officers have been hired with
COPS program funds, the problem worsens.[5] Because the COPS
program does not provide training or equipment funds, some tribes have
expressed reluctance to make these kinds of investments in officers who,
due to the time limit on COPS grants, may be with their departments for
only a few years. Second, the dual authority structure may create a group
of officers who have a stronger loyalty to the tribal government than to
their BIA managers. In the dynamic political context of Indian Country
today, this division of loyalties may be problematic. During intense
political conflicts, for example, disputants have ordered tribal officers to
arrest or detain Federal officers and vice versa.

Staffing and Personnel

In general, the sworn officers in Indian police departments are high school
graduates (in our survey, 100 percent) and graduates of certified law
enforcement training academies (85 percent). Although the figures are
comparable to those for non-Indian departments across the country,
department leaders frequently noted that such figures mask important
deficiencies in the qualifications of current police personnel, as well as
serious problems with recruiting qualified officers. (In fact, departments
ranked problems with recruiting and training qualified applicants as
among the most serious they faced.) For instance, more so than in non-
Indian communities, required background checks turn up issues that
disqualify prospective officers from service. In a few cases, the percentage
of graduates from law enforcement academies was substantially lower
than 85 percent. It is likely that these departments included large numbers
of newly hired officers--often, these additions were made possible with
COPS funding--who had not yet had an opportunity to attend a law
enforcement academy. Unusually large numbers of new hires can result in
considerable waiting periods for available slots at nearby city, regional, or
State police training academies.

Two-thirds of the officers in the departments we surveyed were Native
American, and 56 percent were members of the tribes they served.[6] In
Indian Country, where issues of culture and sovereignty are pronounced,
the fact that, on average, only half of the members of a given police force
were also members of the tribal community they served may be an
important issue for further examination. A more critical finding is that
only 13 percent of the police officers serving Indian Country spoke a
language native to the community they served, although this figure may
mask important regional differences. For example, many officers serving
the Navajo Nation are native speakers, while it is exceedingly rare for
officers serving reservations in North Dakota to speak an appropriate
native language. Most of the approximately 33 percent of officers who
were not Native American were Caucasian, but in some areas, particularly
the Southwest, Hispanics predominated. Twelve percent of the police
officers in the departments we surveyed were women.

A final, important observation is that many departments we visited and
surveyed had additional assistance from local ranger programs. These
programs are not part of the Federal model; that is, they are not a generic
component of Indian police departments, and rangers are not generally
formal staff members of a department. Instead, the programs are locally
generated, quasi-official components of reservation criminal justice
systems. They appear to have evolved where coverage needs or
community concerns required additional service that the police department
itself did not provide. In some cases, rangers provide services driven by
the rural character of reservations, including range and wildlife
management. In these cases, their function is close to that of fish and game
officers. In other cases, their services are only indirectly tied to the rural
features of reservations and are driven more by regional crime issues, such
as illegal immigration and drug smuggling on the Tohono O'odham
reservation and criminal trespass on the Gila River reservation. In these
instances, rangers also assume some responsibilities of Federal law
enforcement agencies. Because of the programs' extremely local origins,
rangers' roles and responsibilities vary from tribe to tribe, although in
every case the presence of rangers obliquely increases the personnel
resources of their local police department.

Facilities and Equipment

During site visits, we saw substantial evidence that the physical resources
supporting Indian police departments and their employees were either
inadequate or designed in a manner that made them impossible to use
efficiently. For example, while the square footage of police facilities
reported by police departments participating in our survey is on a par with
national averages and recommendations, the space is neither well designed
nor in satisfactory condition to support police activities (see also Kaestle
1989; Pilant 1995). In most cases, waiting rooms for the public are rare,
areas that staff can use to write reports are cramped or nonexistent, and
amenities for officers (such as lockers and changing facilities) are virtually
nonexistent. Computer capabilities are outmoded, deficient, or absent.
Many vehicle fleets are at least 3 years old. Indeed, most of the facilities
we inspected were so old (the typical building is 20 or more years old) and
in such poor condition that they could not adequately support a modern,
progressive police department. Finally, as has been widely reported
elsewhere, jail and detention facilities are also inadequate (LeBeau 1998;
Office of the Inspector General 1996). In our survey, almost two-thirds of
all departments reported that their jail and detention space was
overcrowded. At most sites we visited, the jail facilities were too small,
poorly designed, or in poor repair.

Funding

Although several recent research and policy efforts have cited limited
funds as a formidable problem for police departments in Indian Country
(including Executive Committee for Indian Country Law Enforcement
Improvements 1997), assessing the degree of inadequacy of these
resources is somewhat complicated. While we generally agree that a lack
of funding presents an important obstacle to good policing in Indian
Country, we also found that available data were sometimes inadequate and
sometimes pointed to multiple, conflicting conclusions.[7] In the
discussion below, we use three reference points--officers per 1,000
residents, dollars spent on law enforcement per capita, and dollars spent
per employee--to provide a fuller understanding of the resources available
to departments in Indian Country (see exhibit 6).

 o Officers per 1,000 residents. This index compares police coverage in
Indian Country to coverage in non-Indian communities, both rural and
urban. Our survey findings essentially support the U.S. Department of
Justice estimate that the ratio of police officers to residents in Indian
Country is 1.3 per thousand (Executive Committee 1997, 6). However, the
assertion that this ratio represents half the level of police coverage in
comparable non-Indian communities is not consistently supported across
data sources. For communities of less than 10,000 population, the FBI
(1997) reported 2.9 officers per 1,000 inhabitants in 1996, but other
Federal data contradict this estimate. For example, the BJS census of State
and local law enforcement agencies indicates that the 1996 ratio hovered
between 1.8 and 2.0 in predominantly rural States like South Dakota,
North Dakota, and Montana (Reaves and Goldberg 1998, 4).[8]

 o Law enforcement dollars per capita. This figure provides an index of the
total financial resources available to the community to provide law
enforcement services. The Indian communities responding to our survey
spent approximately $83 in public safety funds on each resident. In
contrast, non-Indian communities with populations between 10,000 and
25,000 spent approximately $104 on each resident. If Indian Country
compares best to communities at the lower end of this range, it might be
assumed that the difference is overestimated, but even for smaller non-
Indian communities (with population 2,500-10,000) the figure is $101
(Reaves 1996, 7).

 o Dollars spent per employee. This provides an index of the "support"
employees, particularly officers, receive in terms of salaries (and perhaps
in terms of equipment, facilities, and training) and the ability of the tribe
or department to pay salaries sufficient to recruit and retain highly
qualified officers. We found that tribes spend significantly less per
employee than their non-Indian counterparts. The average operating
expenditure per employee for the tribes responding to our survey was
approximately $36,000, compared with approximately $43,400 for non-
Indian departments serving communities of between 10,000 and 25,000
residents (Reaves 1996, 7). The national average is even higher.[9] Direct
data on officer salaries provide additional information. Our survey
responses suggest that pay for officers in medium-sized to large tribes is
higher than for the smaller Indian police departments described by Luna
and Walker (1998) but slightly lower than the pay that entry-level officers
receive in communities of comparable size ($21,200 to $24,600) (Reaves
1996, 8). The salaries of officers in Indian police departments are also
highly variable. The range in our sample was as low as $13,000 and as
high as $32,000.[10] Some observers believe that tribes inflate the salaries
they report in such surveys, but it is unclear why tribes would want to
present evidence of a large resource base while arguing vigorously for
increased funding.

In summary, existing data suggest that tribes have between 55 and 80
percent of the resource base available to non-Indian communities. But, for
three important reasons, we believe the terms used in this comparison may
underestimate the actual budgetary needs of police departments in Indian
Country.

First, and most important, the appropriate police coverage (police officers
per thousand residents) comparison may not be between Indian
departments and departments serving communities of similar size, but
between Indian departments and communities with similar crime and
social problems. Given that the violent crime rate in Indian Country is
between double and triple the national average (Greenfeld and Smith
1999, 2), comparable communities would be large urban areas with high
violent crime rates and attendant social problems. Such communities--for
example, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and Washington, D.C.--
feature high police-to-citizen ratios, from 3.9 to 6.6 officers per thousand
residents (Bureau of Justice Statistics 1998, 39, table 1.28; 276-278, table
3.118). This comparison suggests that the resource differential between
Indian and non-Indian departments is significantly greater than the above
estimate.

Second, a particularly important factor in providing police coverage in
Indian Country--the immense size of many western reservations--is not
reflected in the above estimates. On reservations where the area patrolled
is large and the tribal community widely distributed, it is necessary to
account for the distances that must be traveled to provide adequate police
coverage. Service calls in remote areas of all four reservations we studied
intensively could occupy a police officer for half a day or longer,
especially in inclement weather. Making police officers as available in
Indian communities as they are elsewhere would require resources above
and beyond those necessary to rectify the differences noted in this
discussion.

Finally, the ratios fail to recognize that capital budgets for policing are
exceedingly uncommon in Indian Country. The absence of capital budgets
is particularly significant for large western reservations. The great
distances that police must travel increase the need for facilities and
technology (such infrastructure as substations and sophisticated
communications technology) that improve the ability of police to serve
large areas and are appropriately financed through capital budgets.
Frequently, operating budgets appear to be the only means available to
departments to finance and support infrastructure (we were unable to
confirm this through a review of police and tribal budgets, however). This
shortfall, invisible in the ratios given above, leads to a problem cited
earlier in this section: The facilities and technology that support Indian
Country police officers are often in poor repair or otherwise inadequate.

Furthermore, capital budget deficiencies extend to other components of the
criminal justice system, and they also have a direct negative effect on the
quality of policing. Detention facilities and the services such facilities
often support, such as alcohol-treatment programs, are an instructive
example: Both are wanting (see LeBeau 1998). Thus, officers who attempt
to develop a proactive response to a household where alcohol abuse
generates repeat calls for service (for child neglect or domestic violence,
for example) often must substitute a brief stay in an overcrowded, outdated
jail for alcohol treatment. The result is an uninterrupted demand by that
household for police services. In sum, the investment necessary to put the
physical infrastructure of Indian Country criminal justice systems on par
with their non-Native counterparts is substantial.

A Closer Look at Four Indian Police Departments

The Indian Country police department described thus far is one that is
attempting to cope with an increasing workload in terms of both
community demands and crime, and is attempting to do so with a
significantly limited resource base. In fact, this characterization does not
capture the severity or complexity of the challenges to policing in Indian
Country. This section strives to complete the picture by providing
contextual detail. It describes pressing problems with the operation,
organization, and management of police departments in Indian Country
through profiles of the departments and tribes we studied in depth.

Briefly, we find that although many problems occur on the level of day-to-
day operations (for example, poor direct supervision, poorly developed
policies and procedures, poor pre- and inservice training), the most
prevalent problems point forcefully to an additional and more significant
issue: police departments serving Indian nations face critical institutional
design challenges. The descriptions that follow highlight how the
problems Indian police departments face are tied to the ways in which
these departments relate to the communities they serve and to the fact that
tribes have yet to recreate the police function in terms of their specific
needs, priorities, and resources.[11] The discussions introduce the
remainder of this report, which considers more fully the issue of the
institutional design of police departments serving Indian reservations.

We preface these profiles by noting that the tribes and departments
described have made and are making remarkable progress. In response to
the problems described below, the Tohono O'odham Nation has remade its
department. Likewise, by investing tribal government resources in
policing, the Gila River Indian Community has taken significant steps
toward building its own police department, one that can serve its
community better. The Flathead department is among the best managed
departments in Indian Country, and Fort Berthold's efforts with regard to
community policing are among the most ambitious.

Tohono O'odham Nation

The first tribe we studied intensively was the Tohono O'odham Nation, in
extreme south central Arizona. Located in the arid, but beautiful, Sonoran
Desert, the Tohono O'odham reservation is characterized not only by the
desert landscape but also by seasonal monsoons and towering mountain
ranges. The Nation is among the largest in the United States, consisting of
almost 2.9 million acres, an area about the size of Connecticut.[12] The
size, landscape, climate, and population distribution present many
contrasts to typical urban policing; for example, some residences in remote
areas can be reached only by horseback and may not be accessible at all
during monsoons. The reservation shares approximately 80 miles of
border with Mexico and the international border actually splits the Nation.
A significant number of tribal members live in Mexico and move freely
across the border. Tribal enrollment is 17,500; approximately 14,000 of
these members live on the reservation. The seat of the Nation's
government and its population center is the town of Sells, with
approximately 7,000 residents.

The Tohono O'odham Nation is relatively unassimilated; native language
use and other evidence of the retention of tradition are high. Tribal
gatherings and meetings strongly reflect important cultural attributes of
talking things out and reaching consensus. Traditional tribal ceremonies
are well attended. The Nation's chief executive and legislative council are
popularly elected. The primary political subdivisions are districts, with
each of the Nation's 11 districts electing two representatives to the council.
In addition, each district elects a district chairperson, whose role is roughly
analogous to that of a mayor. Districts and villages play a substantial role
in reservation life; the majority of tribal members we interviewed said they
identified with their village first, their district second, and the Nation
third.[13]

The Tohono O'odham entered into a 638 contract to administer their police
department in October 1982, which makes it one of the first tribes to
acquire control over its police department from the Federal government.
We first visited the tribe and observed the operation of its police
department during the summer and early winter of 1996. The department
had 55 positions for sworn officers, which made it, on paper, one of the
largest Indian Country police departments; at that time, however, 20 (40
percent) of these positions were unfilled. In addition, the department had
approximately 20 civilian employees and 11 detention officers. The
department also had a large budget relative to most departments in Indian
Country: $7 million in 1996, which was perhaps the highest in Indian
Country regardless of the population served (and much more than a non-
Indian department of comparable size).

In sum, the department had a number of advantages: It existed amidst a
relatively strong tribal culture that invigorated tribal norms and values,
was backed by a lengthy period of direct tribal control of the police
department, and had the support of a generous budget. Despite these
advantages, crime on the reservation seemed to be increasing rapidly,
turnover at the department's executive and staff levels was high, and the
department's credibility was suffering from severe management problems.
Although we emphasize that these were the problems in the Tohono
O'odham department of 1996 and that the situation has improved
dramatically since that time,[14] we choose to focus on the department as
it was then because the challenges it faced are typical of the challenges
that confront departments throughout Indian Country today.

At the time of our first visit, a major cluster of problems for the Tohono
O'odham police department concerned day-to-day operations. The acting
chief, who had been with the department for more than 10 years, could not
produce such basic documentation as personnel files and policy and
procedure manuals, nor in the course of our many conversations could he
recall with any degree of specificity recent modifications or revisions to
department policies. This was also the case with the department's second
in command. In addition, all of the patrol officers we interviewed stated
that they could not recall using or being instructed to use departmental
manuals, although they assured us the manuals existed. Casual attitudes
regarding written policies and procedures are not unusual in the small
departments we have visited, where important policies and procedures can
be easily communicated in roll calls and other meetings or through
informal channels. However, the officers we spoke with could not recall
any regular practice of communicating and reinforcing departmental
policies and procedures.

The lack of attention to basic policies and procedures had a wide range of
effects on a department's operation and on its relations with the
community. Some were disturbing, but relatively minor; for example,
families of some detainees and inmates were refused visits during regular
visiting hours, but others were permitted visits during nonvisiting hours.
We attributed much of this to an overcrowded jail that put tremendous
pressure on detention staff. Some effects, however, were clearly more
serious; interviews with representatives of other tribal criminal justice
agencies (including those normally friendly to police) revealed that the
failure to maintain and enforce departmental policies and procedures had
severe consequences for both the department and the community. In the
previous year, high-speed pursuits had led to tragic and (in the view of
many tribal members and agency representatives) avoidable automobile
crashes. Nevertheless, department representatives were unable to produce
for review either old or new policies and procedures regarding high-speed
chases. Interviewees noted that the lack of policies and procedures
handicapped even the best-intentioned officers, who were forced to work
without useful guidelines for critical police activities. Conversely, it was
difficult to hold negligent officers accountable when clear standards were
not in place. Our interviews indicated that this lack of accountability had
seriously compromised the credibility of the department, not only among
its criminal justice agency partners, but also with the tribal community.

During subsequent visits we learned that these problems were not unusual,
but were emblematic of department management and operations. As is the
case with many departments in crisis, the number and extent of the
problems had increasingly isolated the organization from the community
(Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy 1990). As the department became
increasingly insular, its focus on crime problems became the product more
of its own priorities than of those of the community. Interviews with
members of the department and members of the community suggested a
mismatch both between police and community priorities and between
police and community perceptions of the role of police in community life.
Police complained that tribal members were pressuring them to pay too
much attention to such "low-level" problems as disputes between
neighbors, school-age children, and family members--problems that
formerly would have been settled at either the village or the district level.
On the other hand, community members complained that police officers
were concerned only with such activities as chasing bootleggers and drug
smugglers. Community members often acknowledged that these and other
conventional police activities were important--that they constituted "real"
police business--but they also stated that they needed someone who would
help them with their problems.

This public frustration contributed to the growth of a popular but
controversial quasi-official component of the criminal justice system:
district-administered ranger programs. At the time of our first visit in
1996, several districts had already instituted such programs, and other
districts were demanding funding from the tribal government to start them.
The Tohono O'odham ranger program originally began by patrolling
outlying villages and remote areas. Rangers described themselves as the
eyes and ears of the police department; they were not permitted to interact
with or detain potential suspects but functioned mostly to reassure
residents that they were safe and to respond to the emergencies and needs
of elderly or isolated residents. At Tohono O'odham, it may be that the
dynamic driving the growth of the ranger program was similar to that
driving the growth of private security services in non-Indian communities
in the 1970s and 1980s (Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy 1990, 47-50). The
poor performance and increasing isolation of the police department
precipitated a loss of market share to rangers, who were managed on the
district level and were directly accountable to the district chairperson. In
effect, rangers were seen as more responsive than police officers to the
needs of residents.

To some extent, the diminished credibility of the police department was
both the cause and a result of the growing problem of recruiting and
retaining qualified officers. As already noted, approximately 40 percent of
the funded patrol positions were unfilled when we first visited.
Historically, the ability of tribal candidates to complete certified police
training academies had been limited. Prior to 1996, 40 to 90 percent of
Tohono O'odham recruits failed to complete a certified training program
(depending on the year or class of recruits).[15] Our interviews suggested
that the problem that most plagued young recruits from the Tohono
O'odham Nation was the inability to complete the academic modules of
law enforcement certification courses.[16] Tribal and department
leadership attributed this to a lack of well-developed study habits
necessary to survive the highly regimented program. They also felt that
many O'odham youth at the police academy were away from family and
friends for the first time and that they were ill-prepared for this intense
exposure to a new, sometimes hostile culture.

In summary, the management issues that most plagued the Tohono
O'odham department in 1996 were a lack of day-to-day attention to
departmental policies and procedures, a disconnect between police and
community priorities, and difficulties in recruiting and training officers.
While the department has made tremendous strides toward resolving these
problems, they are generally widespread in Indian Country.

The Gila River Indian Community

The second tribe we visited was the nearby Gila River Indian Community,
which is located on 372,000 acres immediately south of Phoenix, Arizona,
one of the fastest growing urban areas in the United States. Despite the
proximity of Phoenix, however, the geography of the reservation is rural:
Villages are spread across the reservation, and much of the desert land is
accessible only by off-road vehicles. In 1994, the Gila River Enrollment
Office counted approximately 11,550 enrolled members; in 1996,
approximately the same number of Indians lived on the reservation itself,
making it, population-wise, the fourth largest reservation in Arizona and
sixth largest in the United States. Although the Gila River reservation was
established by an Act of Congress in 1859, the ancestors of Community
members have been residents of south central Arizona for hundreds of
years. The group is formally called a "community" because members of
two tribes call the reservation home: the Akimel O'odham ("the River
People," formerly known as the Pima) and the Pee-Posh (also known as
the Maricopa). The Akimel O'odham, the larger of the two tribes, is
closely related to the Tohono O'odham ("the Desert People"), discussed
above.

The Community's proximity to Phoenix and other smaller cities (Chandler,
Casa Grande, Coolidge) has both positive and negative ramifications. For
example, when the Community entered the gaming business in the mid-
1990s, its access to a large urban market provided quick and enduring
financial success. Profits from the gaming enterprise fund a significant
fraction of tribal government operations and give Gila River opportunities
that many other Native nations do not have. On the other hand, the Gila
River Indian Community also suffers from many problems that are
typically considered "urban," including youth gang involvement and a
high rate of violent crime. In the mid-1990s, reservation crime rates
caused Gila River to be known as one of the most crime-ridden Indian
communities in the United States. The ready influence of non-Indian
society has also led to a greater loss of tradition and cultural practices than
at Tohono O'odham, although efforts are being made to revive traditions
and language and, especially, to expose children to them.

The Gila River Indian Community has an elected governor, lieutenant
governor, and 17-member Community Council, as well as an appointed
community manager. The seat of the Community government is Sacaton, a
small town approximately 25 miles from central Phoenix. The reservation
is divided into seven districts, each with an elected district leader, a district
council, and a district service center coordinator. Like Tohono O'odham's,
the Akimel O'odham culture emphasizes talking things out, a characteristic
that is reflected in the many meetings held at all levels of tribal
government.

The police department at Gila River has a tumultuous history. When our
research began in mid-1996, the department was a BIA department,
headed by a BIA police captain (equivalent to a police chief in a municipal
police department), who was responsible to an acting Pima Agency
Superintendent in Sacaton. Although the tribe had run the department for a
brief period in the 1970s, law enforcement was returned to the BIA,
reportedly because some non-BIA sources of Federal funding were no
longer available. In subsequent years, police captains came and went, with
acting captains filling in the gaps. During the same period, crime at Gila
River was increasing and becoming more violent, and the jail became
known for its overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe conditions.[17]

In response to the growing crime problem and fears that the BIA
department had too few resources to meet community needs, the tribal
government created two additional entities to provide law enforcement
services--the rangers and the reserves. The rangers operated briefly in the
1970s and were reorganized in the 1990s under the auspices of the Gila
River Indian Community Department of Land and Water Resources. The
reason for this reporting structure was twofold: First, it acknowledged that
one of the rangers' primary functions was to protect the natural and
cultural resources of the Gila River Community; second, it was a way to
work outside of the BIA to increase the police presence on the reservation.
In practice, the rangers' job was to patrol and police the vast off-road areas
of the reservation and cover for and back up regular police officers. While
they carried a tribal commission to enforce tribal ordinances (all civil
offenses), it was not unusual for them to encounter criminal offenses. In
these situations, they held the offenders until BIA or county police arrived,
confiscated weapons or property, transported or accompanied the
offenders to the reservation boundary, or just asked the offenders to leave.
Although the rangers' authority was sometimes questioned (usually by
violators or off-reservation police), at the time of our initial visits, they
had become a regular and accepted law enforcement presence in the
Community.

The reserves' role was somewhat different. They provided additional
coverage to police officers and rangers who would otherwise work alone.
This was backup that Community members deemed necessary, given the
amount of crime and violence on the reservation. Reserves also provided
security services at public events (especially dances), since police officers
could not be spared routinely for those details.

In addition to commissioning the rangers and reserves, the Community
began a further effort to improve policing: It renewed attempts to 638 the
BIA department. Initially, the tribal government assigned responsibility
for the 638 process to the Law Enforcement Commission, a body whose
original charge was to hear complaints by Community members against
the police as well as concerns of police officers about their department.
Commission members found their liaison and advisory roles to be clear--
but the 638 assignment was not. The Commission received a contract from
the BIA to hire a consultant to assist with the process, and the consultant
drafted a 638 application, but by late 1995, progress had broken down.
The Commission felt it lacked appropriate administrative assistance from
the tribal government for creating the necessary policies and structures to
support the proposed police department. It wanted to hire a police chief,
who would oversee the 638 process and thereby establish his own
department. Others in tribal government wanted to hire a 638 consultant to
handle the process. In the midst of this debate, pressure for improved
policing became especially intense, and the Community government
decided to invest some of its newly gained gaming income in the hiring of
20 tribal police officers--that is, officers who were hired and paid by the
tribe, but incorporated into the BIA department and supervised by its
captain.

When we arrived in August 1996 for a second visit, authority,
communication, and administration problems in the department were
evident and, in some cases, growing. For example, a new BIA captain had
just been assigned to Gila River, the acting Pima Agency BIA
superintendent was about to be replaced by a permanent superintendent,
and the 20 new tribal police officers were beginning to return from
training and integrate into the force. While reporting structures and
relationships were clear on paper, they were being tested in practice. The
previous acting captain had reverted to his rank of sergeant.
Communications from the captain down to the officers generally occurred
in three ways: through the three sergeants, through memos placed in the
officers' department mailboxes, or through memos pinned to the
squadroom bulletin board. But at this point, there were no formal roll calls.
Furthermore, officers who lived on the reservation took their cruisers
home and started their shifts in their cars by radioing to the dispatcher, so
that timely receipt of the memos was hit-or-miss. Administrative
recordkeeping was in disarray,[18] and accountability within the
department (from officers to sergeants and from sergeants to the captain)
was weak. Although the new captain hoped to make some important
changes in community relations (and knew that Gila River was likely to
enter into a 638 contract), he felt that the administrative problems came
first; he saw his first task as "grabbing hold administratively." Community
perceptions were that the department was still in poor shape, although
residents hoped that "their officers" would make things better. Most saw
eventual tribal management as the only way to both solve the ongoing
management problems and improve the quality of policing.

Even so, 638 progress remained slow. By the time of our final visit in
1998, the tribe had removed the Law Enforcement Commission from the
core of the process and appointed a five-person 638 committee to prepare
the required application. The committee was headed by the assistant
community manager and included a tribal attorney, the chairman of the
Law Enforcement Commission, an economic development planner, and a
program planner. In addition, a police consultant from San Jose was hired
to work with the committee.

Meanwhile, some change occurred at the department level, although new
problems arose. The police captain who had arrived in mid-1996 was
transferred from the Gila River Indian Community and replaced by an
acting captain--a criminal investigator who would report directly to the
BIA Phoenix Area Office, rather than to the Pima Agency Superintendent.
The removal of the captain was not related to the 638 process; however,
the continuing turmoil in the department and the need to prepare the
department for tribal management occasioned the specific assignment of
the criminal investigator to Gila River. He made substantial progress in
putting the department in order. Procedures were more formalized than
they had been, greater accountability was established, and preparations
were made for the department and its personnel to shift from BIA to tribal
administration.[19] Nevertheless, before the 638 application was accepted
and departmental preparations were complete, the supervising criminal
investigator was reassigned, purportedly because the Gila River planners
objected to his BIA chain of command--reporting to the Area Office in
Phoenix, rather than to the Pima Agency Superintendent in Sacaton.

On August 10, 1998, the Gila River Indian Community, its 638 contract
with the BIA in place, assumed managerial control of its police
department. A member of the department, who had moved from BIA to
tribal police earlier in the year and was then promoted to sergeant, was
named acting police director while applicants for the permanent position
were being considered.

From at least the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, police management at Gila
River was driven by crises: personnel turnover, increasing crime
(especially increasing violent crime), a sense of urgency to increase the
size of the department, and pressure to develop a 638 contract. The series
of short-term and acting BIA captains in the Gila River Police Department
and the fractured 638 process were indicative of (and perhaps also a result
of) a department in turmoil. Although Gila River's government responded
decisively to the problems by hiring additional officers and building new
facilities and, eventually, by developing a 638 contract, it did not focus on
comprehensive or strategic planning. For Gila River (as for other tribes),
the most opportune time to develop such capacities would have been
during the 638 application process.

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes live on the Flathead Indian
Reservation, which is located on 1.2 million acres in northwestern
Montana (north of Missoula and south of Kalispell and Glacier National
Park, in the Mission Valley).[20] Although the Tribes owned about 22
million acres in the early 1800s, many lands within the reservation were
lost to homesteaders after the Hell Gate Treaty of 1855. The current land
ownership pattern is best described as a checkerboard, although the
Confederated Tribes have been aggressively repurchasing lands since at
least the 1940s. The Tribes and tribal members currently own more than
51 percent of the land within the reservation's boundaries.

Because of the history of homesteading, more non-Indians than Indians
now reside on the reservation. The reservation population comprises
approximately 18,000 non-Indians, compared with 4,100 tribal members
and 2,000 other Indians. Another 2,700 enrolled members live off-
reservation. This mix of tribal and nontribal residents creates an even
greater jurisdictional complexity than exists on most other reservations. In
addition to the State and tribal police, for example, four counties
(Flathead, Lake, Missoula, and Sanders) and four municipalities (Hot
Springs, Polson, Ronan, and St. Ignatius) operate their own law
enforcement agencies within the reservation boundaries. The
governmental seat of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes,
including its police department, is in Pablo.

The governing body of the Confederated Tribes is the Tribal Council,
which includes 10 members from 8 districts. The Council chairperson,
who is elected from and by the 10 members, is the Tribes' chief executive,
although the Council also hires an executive secretary to oversee many
government departments, including Law and Order (the police
department). The BIA had a strong presence on the reservation until the
mid-1970s, but today its presence and influence are extremely limited. For
example, the Salish and Kootenai police department operates under a self-
governance compact (see chapter 2), an arrangement in which BIA
involvement is minimal.

At the time of our visits in mid-1997, the police chief had been with the
department for 25 years. He first joined as an officer (one of only four) and
4 years later was promoted to chief. Ten years later, the department still
had only six officers. In 1986, in the wake of local protests over water
rates, the department hired five more officers. Just before the 1994
retrocession agreement (described in greater detail below) was
implemented, another five officers were hired. As of 1997, the department
included 17 sworn positions (including 2 vacancies): 11 patrol officers, 2
investigators (one of whom was on detail to a regional narcotics task
force), 2 sergeants, 1 lieutenant, and 1 police chief. All sworn officers,
except the drug task force officer, were tribal members. The department
also included 13 civilians--5 jailers, 6 dispatchers, 1 clerk, and 1 cook--
among whom there was considerable overlap of duties and job sharing.
For example, the clerk was once a dispatcher-jailer in the department and
sometimes still filled in as dispatcher, jailer, or cook; in addition, because
she had been trained to interview child victims of sexual abuse and female
victims of domestic violence, she could assist both the police department
and social services in their investigative duties. Also, some of the civilians
had attended the police academy.

In contrast to most of the other facilities we visited, the Salish and
Kootenai police headquarters and jail were exceptionally clean and
orderly. Nevertheless, the police chief was concerned about poor
conditions for the inmates: They were isolated in their cells, had little to
do, rarely saw the light of day, and had only occasional access to a very
small exercise yard. Meals were delivered to cells because there was no
common area in which the inmates could gather. However, managers of
the Salish and Kootenai facility were not struggling with
overcrowding,[21] poor sanitary conditions, or violence.

In general, the Tribal Council and tribal administration have strongly
supported the police department, evidenced in part by departmental budget
allocations. Although most of the department's funding comes from the
Tribes' BIA funds (in 1997, $1,228,686 came from BIA funds and $11,546
directly from the Tribes), the virtue of compacting (as opposed to
contracting) is that the tribal government sets budget priorities and
allocates funds. The police department, like other departments, submits its
budget request to the tribal government. Then, the Confederated Tribes'
Office of Administration and Budget creates an overall tribal budget, the
Council approves allocations, and financial officers disburse funds.
According to the police chief, fiscal year 1997 was the first year in which
the department received less than it had requested.

By most accounts and by our own observation, the Salish and Kootenai
police department is a well-run, professional department. The department
is well connected to the tribal government for oversight purposes, has been
increasing in size consistent with community needs, boasts an extremely
competent and generally well-liked staff, and is concerned about the
traditional problems under its purview. Yet, we also observed that,
institutionally, the department has been struggling to respond to several
opportunities for improving the already high quality of policing it has
offered the community.

For example, the department installed a new computer system, Swift
Justice, shortly before the site visits began in 1997. It provides officers
with report-writing software, which allows new incident data to be
immediately incorporated into the system, links the data with jail and
dispatch information, and offers improved storage and reporting functions.
While department personnel were generally pleased with the transition to
the new system and its capacities, both officers and prosecutors missed the
traditional access to paper reports for reviewing cases. Prosecutors, in
particular, suffered from the limited information flow. They had been
accustomed to learning about cases promptly by looking through a basket
of reports as they (the prosecutors) passed through the police department,
but the new computer system, to which the prosecutors were not linked,
eliminated these hard copies. Nevertheless, the new system allows the
department to produce incident reports, monthly and annual reports, and
other analyses more quickly and efficiently than it had before. The
department clerk manages the system, creating the reports and providing
technical assistance to the officers. It is unclear, however, whether the
available statistics are used by the chief or others to determine or change
departmental strategy. In other words, opportunities for better institutional
linkage between the police department and the prosecutors office and for
improved strategic planning may have been bypassed.

The retrocession agreement is a second example of challenges faced by the
department. Signed by the State of Montana, the Confederated Salish and
Kootenai Tribes, and all the jurisdictions (except Lake County) within the
reservation boundaries,[22] the agreement cedes "exclusive jurisdiction
over misdemeanor crimes committed by Indians" back to the Tribes.[23]
This right had been withdrawn from the Confederated Tribes under the
provisions of PL 83-280 (which subjected many Indian nations to the
criminal misdemeanor jurisdiction of the States).

Retrocession engendered a flood of new police activity. Calls to the
department nearly doubled between 1993 and 1996, from 4,109 to 7,049.
To its credit, the Salish and Kootenai department adjusted well to its
increase in size and activity level, as well as to the new jurisdictional rules.
Salish and Kootenai officers reported (and we observed) that they worked
well with officers from the other jurisdictions, even the Lake County
deputies (although on an administrative level, Lake County and the
Confederated Tribes did not have a warm relationship).[24] Even so, the
retrocession agreement continues to implicitly challenge the department to
move beyond reliance on rapid-response policing to rethinking its strategy
and role in the community.

Another challenge was noted at the time of our site visits. Although the
department had been running smoothly, both community members and the
Tribal Council were starting to ask for a new police strategy--they were
explicitly asking the department to become more involved in and establish
better relationships with the community. In July 1997, as part of the
budget process, the Council sent memoranda to all departments, specifying
its expectations. According to the police chief, the Council always had
asked departments to write a list of goals as part of the budget process, but
this was the first time that the Council had given a return list of
expectations. For the police department, the Council requested the
following:

 o A focus on community law enforcement work, rather than traffic
enforcement.[25]

 o A focus on community relations, to build trust and relationships.

 o Presence at tribal and community activities.

At the same time, some communities were asking for more police presence
and involvement. One community at the southern end of the reservation,
Arlee, had been experiencing vandalism and other crimes by juveniles,
including a bank robbery. Its residents were asking that individual officers
be responsible for specific geographical areas, rather than "running from
community to community." Some tribal members even suggested that
officers live in the specific communities they policed. At an Arlee
community meeting in August 1997, the community learned that it would
get a resident officer--not by departmental design but by the fortuitous
relocation of a new officer. This officer had retired from a police
department in another State, owned land in Arlee, and had just been hired
by the Salish and Kootenai department. At the meeting, he expressed his
intention to be available to the Arlee community--in the schools, at
community activities, and in the neighborhood crime watch group. He also
challenged a Lake County deputy sheriff who attended the meeting and
lived in Arlee to do the same (according to residents' private comments,
however, this deputy sheriff had not been, and was not likely to be, either
visible or responsive to their requests). Although the tribal officer could
not promise to be the neighborhood patrol officer (the police department
had said it could not give any community its own officer), he did take the
initiative to commit himself to an ongoing relationship with his
community, one that would take him beyond his working hours to bring
the presence of a concerned police officer into the neighborhood. We
found it notable that a police officer, especially a new one, felt free to
make this commitment; he was stepping outside the bounds of
Confederated Tribes police practice but must have felt that his chief would
support him.

Although the Salish and Kootenai police department is responsive, stable,
and generally well respected, at the time of our site visits, it was facing
new challenges. Most striking were the Council's expectations, which
seemed to reflect community concerns and suggested the need for a new
policing strategy. With the encouragement of the Council and the
community, the department was poised to use these new challenges as an
opportunity to think strategically and develop a policing style even more
tightly bound to the Tribes' institutions, priorities, values, and needs.

Three Affiliated Tribes

The Three Affiliated Tribes (the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) live on the
Fort Berthold Reservation in west-central North Dakota. Tribal
membership is approximately 10,000, of whom 4,000 live on the
reservation. The Tribes have developed a modest gambling enterprise, but
poor economic conditions predominate. The geography of this area
presents a striking contrast to the desert landscapes of the Tohono
O'odham and Gila River reservations and the mountainous vistas of the
Flathead reservation: The Fort Berthold Reservation occupies
approximately 1 million acres of softly rolling wheat fields and prairies.
About 11 percent of the reservation is covered by Lake Sakakawea, which
was formed by the Garrison Dam in the early 1950s. The lake not only
split the reservation, but also drove the Tribes from the fertile, protected
banks of the Missouri River to the surrounding windblown prairie. In the
summer, heat encourages residents to take advantage of the cool lakeside,
but in winter, long periods of extreme cold and blizzards can slow travel
and isolate residents. In brief, the size of the reservation, its geography,
and the seasonally intemperate weather complicate the provision of police
coverage. The sheer size of the reservation and the presence of the lake
mean that a single routine service call to an outlying community can
occupy an officer for a substantial period. Poor winter weather can isolate
individual residences, and even entire communities, for days at a time.

At the time of our site visits (in 1996, 1997, and 1998), the Three
Affiliated Tribes police department was a BIA-managed "split"
department, comprised of BIA officers and tribal officers funded through
COPS grants. Indeed, leaders of this well-managed department have relied
on COPS officers to play a critical role in assisting the department in
addressing its steadily increasing workload. For example, the increased
police coverage these officers provide helped the department head off a
threat by the political leadership in an outlying community to organize its
own independently administered police department. The need for COPS
officers correctly implies that the department has a limited resource base
(its 1998 budget was $1 million). Hiring tribal officers is one of many
adjustments the department has made to cope with its lack of resources
(most of the other adjustments affect police operations). Remarkably,
these supervision and resource challenges did not deter the Three
Affiliated Tribes department from developing and using policies and
procedures for essential police practices (such as background checks of
new officers and standardized disciplinary procedures). In fact, at the time
of our most recent visit, the department was developing new policies and
procedures for a community-oriented bicycle patrol in its most
concentrated population center, New Town. Department leadership was
eager to build on such practices to better address crime in a proactive
manner.

Even so, and even though the community exhibited a higher level of
satisfaction with its police department than was present at other sites, there
was little congruence between the department's conception of its role in
the community and the community's conception of that role. In interviews,
tribal members consistently focused on their desire for police to employ
methods built on tribal values and culture; they felt that police could play a
powerful role in preserving and extending tribal values and culture and
that, in doing so, the police could more effectively address crime. In this
way, tribal members seemed to be pressing police to expand their mission
beyond fighting crime and to become an institution equally concerned
with maintaining and contributing to social order.

The notion may have come to mind--and seemed immediately logical--
because of the existence of a traditional society with precisely that
purpose. Almost every tribal member we interviewed brought up the Black
Mouth Society, an association of wise and courageous older males who
played a central role in maintaining social order during pre- and early
reservation life (Bowers 1992; Gilman and Schneider, 1987). One elder,
now in her 90s, recalled that as a child she was warned that if she didn't
behave, her relatives and neighbors "would tell the Black Mouths." She
recalled that a warning was almost always enough.[26]

In contrast, most members of the police department saw their role
primarily in conventional law enforcement terms. Officers talked regularly
about responding more quickly and efficiently to such problems as gangs,
violence, and substance abuse. More to the point, the department was
organized and managed to address these conventional problems. This is to
be expected in the context of an apparently rapidly growing crime problem
and substantial political pressure to respond to it. Indeed, the Three
Affiliated Tribes' police department had the strongest orientation to
proactive strategies that we were able to identify in the course of our
study. But department leadership said they were caught between standard
crime control tasks and community demands to devote increased resources
to prevention, a dilemma made more acute by the department's limited
resource base.

When we asked departmental and tribal representatives why they had not
entered their police function into a 638 contract, they frequently replied
that the Tribes did not want to get into the "law enforcement business."
Conceived of in this way, policing was not a function that the Tribes'
political history and culture had prepared them to adopt. Policing was seen
as a necessary accommodation to modern reservation life, rather than as a
means of maintaining social order through the assertion of tribal values
and culture (the role played by the Black Mouth Society). Given that the
current 638 contracting process does not invite a consideration of the
police function in these terms, but focuses instead on ensuring the
provision of a standard menu of police services, it is not surprising that
departmental and tribal leaders did not view 638 as an opportunity to
reconsider the fundamental role of police in community life.

Of course, there were other reasons department members did not fully
support the possible transition to tribal management. While they
recognized that their current approach to law enforcement distanced them
from the community, they also asserted that in the volatile political context
of tribal life, Federal employment gave them the job security they needed
to perform their work in an independent, responsible manner, without the
threat of political reprisals. Such dynamics were evident in a heated
dispute overheard between two officers who were trying to decide which
one should arrest a prominent tribal official: Should it be the BIA officer,
a Federal employee, who was in danger of only social reprisals for
arresting the official, or should it be the COPS-funded officer, a tribal
employee, who would be in danger of not only social reprisals but also
economic ones?

Nonetheless, department leaders predicted that the question of tribal
involvement in the "law enforcement business" would come to the fore in
the near future. Tribal leadership already objected to BIA plans to shift
line authority for policing away from the local agency to the regional level
(to the regional BIA Law Enforcement Division). They felt that the loss of
local control alone might push them to 638 their police function. If COPS
funding was also eliminated (resulting in a loss of police officers) and
crime problems were ongoing, the Tribes' reluctance to actively invest in
law enforcement would certainly be tested.

In sum, the Three Affiliated Tribes face a challenge common to
communities in Indian Country--reconciling policing with indigenous
means of social control. The next challenge is to redesign police
departments as core institutions of tribal government. As at Flathead,
community members' requests for a different style of service presents an
opportunity to seize these challenges.

Conclusions

In the view of many researchers, policymakers, and police professionals,
reservation policing is in crisis. In addition to the examples we describe, a
thorough audit of one of the largest police departments in Indian Country,
performed in 1996 by the BIA's Division of Law Enforcement Services,
supports this assertion. The audit identified problems that were similar to--
and in some cases more severe than--those we found:

 o Poor employee morale and high turnover resulted in a lack of well-
qualified and experienced officers.

 o Basic departmental management was flawed (for example, there was
little effective direct supervision of officers and investigative practices
were poor).

 o Inadequate budgets, fiscal mismanagement, and even corruption created
serious obstacles to the effective delivery of important police services and
programs.

 o Undue political interference in police operations inhibited the ability of
the police to perform their duties in a fair and equitable manner and
reduced the credibility of the police in the eyes of the community.

 o These and other problems created widespread and serious community
dissatisfaction with the police (Naranjo et al. 1996).

A number of special reports, commissions, conferences, and blue-ribbon
committees have grappled with the problems that police departments in
Indian Country face and, in response, have offered a number of
recommendations and proposals. These include increased funding,
tightened management, clarified reporting relationships, and updated
technology (see Executive Committee 1997; Silverman 1996). Many of
these responses are necessary to improve policing in Indian Country, but
they may treat the symptoms, rather than the disease. Our research,
particularly the information gathered through the case studies, suggests
that many of the problems with Indian Country policing have more
fundamental, institutional roots than the "typical fixes" take into account.
Further, we argue that these problems do not originate in the contemporary
administration of policing by tribes. Rather, they originate in the history
and current administration of Federal Indian policing policy. To better
understand this proposition, we turn next to an extended discussion of the
foundations of policing in Indian Country.

Notes

1. Interview at Mescalero Apache, March 1996.

2. As noted, the typical department has approximately 32 employees, 16 of
whom are sworn officers. It serves a large land area with a relatively small
population, which is located in both rural areas and more densely
populated, "semiurban" communities. Like most departments in Indian
Country, the typical department works with a limited resource base. It is
administered either by the tribe through a 638 contract or by the BIA.

3. Approximately 40 percent of all BIA-administered departments in our
survey reported that they employed both tribal and BIA officers.

4. The Gila River Indian Community was a prominent exception to this
finding. Before the police department was 638ed, tribal officers' salaries
were higher than those of BIA officers due to a 20-percent salary increase
given to all tribal employees in September 1996. Federal retirement
benefits had not been matched, however.

5. The grants were designed to facilitate the implementation of community
policing and, as such, were naturally directed to local police departments.
Therefore, Federal agencies, such as BIA police departments, cannot apply
for COPS funding, and the new officers must be tribal employees.

6. We note, however, that these numbers are moving targets. As tribes
continue to pursue 638 contracts and self-governance compacts,
departments will fall under tribes' member-preference guidelines, and the
percentages of officers who are Native and who are tribal members will
rise.

7. Indian Country population estimates cause many of the problems. For
example, Federal figures for 1993 indicate that departments serving
communities with populations of 10,000 to 25,000 had an average budget
of $1.6 million dollars (Reaves 1996, 7). In the mid-1990s the typical
department in Indian Country served a population of approximately
10,000 residents and had a law enforcement budget of $1 million--or
approximately 60 percent of a comparably sized non-Indian community's
budget. (When inflation is taken into account, the difference is even
larger.) As we note when describing the typical department, however,
10,000 may be an overestimate of the average service population. Then,
appropriate budget comparison changes quite dramatically: If the
population of the community served by the typical reservation police
department is closer to 6,000, the comparable non-Indian community's
budget is $540,000, which suggests that Indian communities have
relatively generous budgets. Furthermore, the ratio of officers to citizens
jumps from 1.6 per 1,000 population (16 officers serving a community of
10,000) to 2.7 per thousand (16 officers serving a community of 6,000);
this figure is substantially higher than that of non-Indian communities of
comparable size. Indeed, among the four sites we studied intensively, the
ratio of officers to citizens was 3.3 per 1,000 resident tribal members.
Despite these concerns about the effect of population estimates on per
capita resource calculations, the discussion in this section relies on the
population estimate of 10,000--not only because it is supported by recent
important policy pieces in the field (especially the Executive Committee
for Indian Country Law Enforcement Improvement's "Final Report"), but
also because it is appropriate to draw attention to the lack of reliable
service population data. Moreover, higher population estimates may
account for the fact that restricting the "community served" figure to
resident tribal members ignores the many individuals who (1) live off but
work on the reservation, (2) travel through the reservation for purposes of
business or pleasure, (3) live seasonally on the reservation, or (4) are full-
time but nonmember or non-Native reservation residents.

8. It is worth noting that this figure (the 1.8-2.0 ratio) includes both State
and local sworn officers. When State police officers are excluded, the ratio
drops to between 1.0 and 1.6 officers per thousand population. We believe
the appropriate staff comparison should include State officers, however,
since small, rural, non-Indian communities benefit from the services of
city, county, and State police.

9. Theoretically, a low "dollars spent per employee" estimate could reflect
tribes' conscious choice to maximize police coverage instead of hiring
fewer officers and allocating increased funding to critical support
functions (management information systems, training, improved
equipment). Indeed, we speculate that the large size of the areas policed, as
well as the social and political dynamics unique to Indian Country, compel
tribes to focus on coverage rather than on support functions. For example,
the political pressure outlying reservation communities create as they
agitate for increased police services seems to result in more police officers
rather than fewer but better-equipped and better-supported officers.
However, the fact that both "officers per 1,000 residents" and "dollars per
employee" are lower within Indian Country than without suggests that
resources are truly deficient and not only for tribes that have chosen to
fund
personnel instead of support functions.

10. The median ($21,000) falls below the average, but not so far that the
figures in the highest range could be said to skew the average, making it
unrepresentative of salaries overall.

11. It is often claimed that the rural setting and small communities typical
of Indian Country generate a sort of informal community policing
approach that grows out of officers' close relations with citizens and the
multiple demands these close relationships generate. But although officers
might know more about the citizens and neighborhoods they serve than
their urban counterparts, and might occasionally be called upon to perform
duties outside of those normally carried out by their urban colleagues, the
department itself is not necessarily organized and managed to effectively
respond to (and draw on) tribal values, priorities, and resources.

12. Most, but not all, of the Nation's land holdings are contiguous. The
10,000-acre Gila Bend Reservation is northwest of the reservation and is
the site of the Nation's casino operation. The 71,000-acre San Xavier
Reservation lies to the east near Tucson. Twenty-acre Florence Village lies
north of the reservation, near the city of Florence. The distribution of land
holdings also complicates police coverage.

13. Although most traditional mechanisms of social order were focused on
the local level, the organization of the police department was centralized.
This made it difficult for the department to distribute its staff in a manner
that might facilitate leveraging these community resources. To some
extent, the same could be said of the Gila River Indian Community and its
department, which is discussed in the next section.

14. We attribute the improvements not only to new departmental
leadership but also to strong support for improved policing on the
legislative and executive levels of tribal government.

15. This estimate is based on interviews; no data to support this assertion
were available, mostly due to a lack of personnel records.

16. A related problem at that time was that many members of the force had
less than 12th-grade reading, writing, and math skills.

17. At the time of the initial site visits, Gila River was planning to build a
new Justice Center, which would include new adult and juvenile detention
facilities. On May 1, 1998, the Community celebrated the ribbon cutting
for the state-of-the-art juvenile facility (though it would not be occupied
for some time, due to staffing difficulties). On December 4, 1999, the
dedication ceremony was held for the main criminal justice facility.

18. Although the dispatchers' logs and the incident reports that officers did
complete were filed in an orderly fashion, officers did not always turn in
reports. Also, in at least one department report to the BIA, the numbers did
not match other data department leaders had provided (e.g., number of
homicides), nor were they internally consistent (the number of crimes
cleared sometimes exceeded the number of crimes reported).

19. One useful, but short-lived, byproduct of his preparations for 638ing
arose from the inventory he conducted on the vehicle fleet. During the
inventory, officers could not take their cruisers home at the end of each
shift, so they needed to report to headquarters to begin their next shift.
This allowed each shift to start with a roll call, improving day-to-day
communication. However, it was expected that as soon as the inventory
was complete, officers would once again be able to take cruisers home,
and the roll calls would end.

20. With the Hell Gate Treaty of 1855, 12 Stat. 975, three groups were
consolidated onto the Flathead Reservation: "Flatheads," Pend d'Oreilles,
and Kootenais. The Flatheads and Pend d'Oreilles are both Salish peoples,
with similar languages but somewhat different cultures. The Kootenais are
a non-Salish people, with both a different language and a different culture.

21. At the time, official detention capacity is 20, but the daily average for
adults was 12.

22. Cover memorandum on the "Memorandum of Agreement Between
State of Montana, Flathead County, Lake County, Missoula County,
Sanders County, City of Hot Springs, City of Ronan, Town of St. Ignatius
and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation,"
dated October 12, 1994, notes Lake County's decision not to sign.
Additionally, the city of Polson, the county seat of Lake County, entered
into a separate agreement with the Tribes, but Lake County also declined
the opportunity to enter into a similar special agreement.

23. "Memorandum of Agreement," above.

24. At least some of this respect arose from the fact that Flathead officers
usually attended the state police academy, where they received the same
training as all the other officers--an equivalence that facilitated both
cooperation and cross-jurisdictional activities.

25. Much police concern and attention is given to traffic problems on U.S.
Route 93, which bisects the reservation from north to south. At the time of
our visits, the only limit on speed during the day (except in business
districts) is that motorists drive in a "reasonable and prudent" manner; the
road is generally only one lane in each direction; cars are turning onto and
off of the road as it changes from high-speed to commercial district; and
the highway serves local residents, commuters, truckers, and tourists alike.
DUIs are a tremendous problem, and fatalities are not uncommon. Traffic-
related activities deflect a great deal of police time from other problems.

26. Interview with Cora Baker, May 1998.

------------------------------

Chapter 5. Federal Policy and Policing in Indian Country

This section examines the history of reservation policing and how that
history interacts with current Federal policies to influence the
effectiveness of tribal police. A core issue that emerges is the inadequacy
of Federal policy to promote the ability of Indian nations to design and
exert meaningful control over their own policing institutions. This failure
is sharpened when contrasted with findings from research in Indian
Country on the characteristics of effective governing institutions:
Governing institutions are more effective when they are self-determined
and when they reflect, in a functionally meaningful way, a tribe's
underlying cultural norms and values. Indeed, self-determined institutions
are more likely to provide this match between institutional design and
citizens' jointly held social, cultural, and political expectations and values.

The History of Reservation Policing

When the reservation system was established in the early 1800s, law
enforcement was mostly provided by Federal troops, whose
responsibilities reflected the U.S. Government's interest in limiting
Indians' ability to interfere with the economic pursuits of non-Indian
settlers. For example, soldiers were responsible for maintaining levels of
order sufficient to prevent violent activity from spilling beyond reservation
boundaries,[1] for enforcing the laws and policies that restricted tribes to
reservations, for prohibiting a wide range of traditional activities that were
viewed as immoral or criminal, and for overseeing the rationing of food
and other supplies. (It was not until passage of the Major Crimes Act in
1885 that crimes whose effects were not felt outside of reservation
boundaries--that is, crimes by Indians against Indians--drew the official
attention of the Federal Government.) In short, Indian communities were
policed by the military arm of a colonial government (Barlow 1994; Peak
1989; Wachtel 1980, 13).

Official U.S. Government permission for Native Americans to participate
in the policing of reservations was first granted in the 1860s. Over the next
20 years, a wide variety of policing arrangements evolved: About one-
third of all reservation police forces consisted primarily of tribal members;
others included a mix of tribal members, Indians from other reservations,
and non-Indians (Knepper and Puckett 1995). Significantly, Native
representation on these police forces should not be interpreted as a sign of
increased control by tribes over their own affairs. The U.S. Government,
not tribes, supervised a majority of the forces, and police continued to act
in its interest.

Indians themselves viewed the Native Americans on these forces as agents
of the U.S. Government, and the officers were required to emulate non-
Indians. They "were expected to set an example by wearing white man's
attire, cutting their hair, practicing monogamy and taking an allotment.
Their duties included determining whether a fellow tribesman was
working enough to merit his sugar, coffee, and tobacco rations" (BIA
1995b, 24). Indeed, as one U.S. Indian agent is reported to have remarked,
"The police are looked upon as the common foe, and the multitude are
bitterly opposed to them" (Hagan 1980, 49-50). Furthermore, one reason
tribal members were favored as police officers by the U.S. Government
was that they were more adept in dealing with traditional leaders than were
Federal troops (Meissner 1995). In this sense, the increased representation
of Native Americans on reservation police forces was motivated primarily
by the tactical advantage their knowledge and experience provided the
Federal Government in maintaining an orderly reservation system, rather
than by a recognition that tribes should be accorded increased rights to
self-determination (Barlow 1994; BIA 1995b; Hagan 1980).

The historical record regarding reservation policing from the turn of the
century through the 1950s is limited. The General Allotment Act of
1887[2] transferred nearly 90 million (of an original 138 million) acres of
Indian land to State and Federal jurisdiction, and by the 1920s most
reservations had only one or two officers. The number swelled briefly
during Prohibition, but with the end of that era, the budget for and number
of reservation police dropped once again (Deloria and Lytle 1983). In
1956, for example, the ratio of police to residents on Indian reservations
was 2 per 5,000 compared to a ratio of 10 per 5,000 in the country as a
whole (BIA 1995b, 64). The BIA organized this small nucleus of officers
into the first modern reservation police forces (Wachtel 1982, 112).

During the first 60 years of the 20th century, tribes themselves supported
at least some of the law enforcement presence on reservations. Even so,
the support was grudging. For example, many accounts of reservation life
during the period allude to the role of reservation police in forcibly
removing children from their families and sending them to Federal
boarding schools, which were infamous for their hostility to Native
culture. We received firsthand accounts of these activities in our research
at the Fort Berthold and Flathead reservations; the phenomenon is also
documented in research literature (Gilman and Schneider 1987).

During the late 1960s and the 1970s, Indian activism (including the
occupation of BIA offices in Washington, D.C., and the siege of Wounded
Knee), drew new attention to the problems of crime on reservations. This
attention generated efforts to increase funds for policing and to
professionalize police departments and other components of the Indian
criminal justice system. In this period, the number of police in Indian
Country increased significantly and Congress appropriated funds to
establish the BIA Law Enforcement Academy (BIA 1975). These changes
had two important results for Indian police management and policy--
results with long-lasting implications. First, efforts to organize and
manage the rapidly growing police presence in Indian Country were based
on the "professional" model of policing, the dominant approach to
nonreservation (municipal) policing in the 1960s and 1970s (BIA 1975,
83, 91). Second, the influence of the BIA Division of Law Enforcement
Services over reservation policing greatly increased.

The professional model is characterized by a centralized organizational
hierarchy (with military-style ranks and structure), insulation between the
police and community and political leaders, and a narrow focus of the
police function on crime fighting (and away from other problem solving).
The activities of police operating within this model include preventive
patrol by automobile, rapid response to centrally dispatched calls for
service, and crime control through the apprehension and incapacitation of
offenders (Kelling and Moore 1988).

In part, the professional approach evolved as a result of new technology.
Automobiles, two-way car radios, dispatch capabilities, and early
computers made it possible to respond to emergencies. But the
professional approach was also a reaction to the "political" policing that
had previously dominated in America's cities, in which police were so
closely linked to neighborhoods and local politicians that they were
virtually an adjunct to local political machines.[3] Police operating within
the political model were thoroughly integrated into neighborhood and
community life, knew neighborhood residents, understood community
norms and customs, and were able to rely on community connections in
providing services, preventing crimes, and solving crimes; however, the
approach had substantial downsides. Intimacy with the community,
closeness to political leaders, and a decentralized organizational structure
gave rise to numerous forms of corruption. As a result, architects of the
professional model sought to reform policing by severing the close link
between police and citizens and insulating the police from political
pressure. In combination with new technology, this new attitude about
what police officers should be doing led to the elimination of
neighborhood foot patrols and the demise of personalized responses to
community crime and safety problems.

As noted, the second important result for reservation police policy and
management was the growing prominence of the BIA Division of Law
Enforcement Services. During the long period from the turn of the century
to the early 1960s, responsibility for reservation policing had (by virtue of
neglect) fallen to the tribes and, to a lesser extent, a variety of Federal
entities. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, law enforcement
services rapidly came under the authority of the BIA. Both the increased
presence and the professionalization of police on reservations were driven
by the BIA through a series of requests to Congress for increased funds.
Consequently, it secured and institutionalized primary control over Indian
police policy and management (Wachtel 1980).

As a result of these two factors, not only did tribes have less direct control
over general police policy, but because of the influence of the professional
model, Indian communities were also further distanced from the police
departments serving them. In fact, these factors preserved the legacy of
police as an occupying army--Federal agencies imposed both the design
and administration of policing on Indian nations with little regard for
indigenous mechanisms of social control, just as they had in the late 19th
century.

The Contemporary Problem

Ironically, at the same time that the BIA Division of Law Enforcement
Services was growing in prominence and the professional model of
policing was in ascendance, the movement toward sovereignty was the
dominant political force in Indian Country. During the late 1960s and
early 1970s, Indians worked intensively to acquire increased levels of self-
determination and self-governance. As a result of their advocacy, tribal
governments acquired the power to legislate, regulate, and adjudicate
public policy on their reservations. Tribal governments came to include
more powerful legislatures and courts; to possess taxation, economic
development, and environmental regulatory authority; and to provide
infrastructure and public services (Cornell and Kalt 1993, 7; O'Brien 1989,
197-254). In large part, tribes acquired increased control of these
governmental functions through PL 93-638, the Indian Self-Determination
and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which, as noted above, allows
tribes to contract with the Federal Government to regain management
control over programs otherwise administered by the BIA and other
Federal agencies.

Policing services were not exempt from this movement. But despite PL
93-638 (and the accelerated pace at which tribes are contracting with the
U.S. Government to deliver their own police services), police policy in
Indian Country is still driven, both directly and indirectly, by Federal
agencies rather than by tribes.

This arrangement has advantages. For example, employees of departments
that are still managed by the BIA are Federal employees and, as such, are
provided with job security, livable salaries, competitive retirement
packages, and protection from undue political pressure in the uncertain
political environment typical of many tribes. These benefits and
protections help attract qualified candidates to the field and help police
officers carry out their duties. Another advantage of Federal involvement
is the provision of free training for police officers and criminal
investigators at the BIA police academy in New Mexico, training that has
improved the overall quality of policing in many reservation departments.
The improved quality of criminal investigation under the leadership of the
BIA Division of Law Enforcement Services is yet another benefit.
Nonetheless, U.S. Government policy has created a number of problems
for policing in Indian Country--in departments under both BIA and 638
contract administration.

Multiple Lines of Authority Decrease Accountability and Create Tribal
Capacity Vacuums

A key aspect of the BIA management structure is control over policing,
which occurs through two separate administrative paths (illustrated in
exhibit 7). The first path governs the patrol function of BIA police
departments. Patrol officers are supervised by the department's
commanding officer (usually a police captain). Until recently, this officer
was supervised in turn by the local BIA superintendent, who was
responsible for policing and all the other BIA programs run through the
agency[4]--and so on up to the highest levels of BIA administration in
Washington, D.C. (Now, BIA police captains report directly to the BIA
Division of Law Enforcement Services, which is headquartered in New
Mexico.) The second administrative path governs the investigative
function, over which the department's commanding officer does not have
line authority. Instead, line authority for this function lies directly with the
BIA Division of Law Enforcement Services. Neither path allows
supervision by or accountability to representatives of the tribal
community. This complicated management structure has several
implications:

 o Until recently, the patrol and investigative functions in the same police
department were under the authority of different departments within the
BIA.

 o BIA police departments' commanding officers do not have line authority
over their own criminal investigators.

 o Authority and accountability for BIA police management and policy are
diffused among many individuals and bureaucratic entities (although
policy changes have made the group less diffuse than before).

The justification for placing both patrol and criminal investigation under
the authority of the BIA Division of Law Enforcement Services is sound:
Supervision of both functions is within a single division of the Bureau that
has substantial expertise in law enforcement. However, the arrangement is
not without difficulties. Local BIA police captains still do not have line
authority over their criminal investigators. Many tribal leaders and BIA
superintendents we interviewed were concerned that the Division of Law
Enforcement Services seated in New Mexico might know less about and
be less responsive to tribal needs, resources, and priorities than the
superintendents. Furthermore, the arrangement is roughly analogous to
having city police departments supervised by State or Federal authorities--
a degree of external control that is contemplated only in those rare
instances when a police department is either so corrupt or so poorly
managed that it must be placed in receivership. In sum, the potential for
accountability problems persists.

The complexity of the overall management structure also requires tribes to
exert political pressure and build their cases for new policies with a wide
variety of overseers. We found that tribal criminal justice planning bodies
often allocated more of their limited resources to lobbying oversight
agencies (to getting authority) than they did to exercising authority in the
service of sound strategic planning. Thus, even when tribes devote
increased energy to policing, this energy is not used efficiently to develop
effective police departments. Another result is that even those tribes intent
on improving policing have difficulty knowing where to start, which
political players to engage to further tribal aims and how to address the
many substantive planning challenges. As described in chapter 4, this was
a problem for the Gila River Indian Community as it pursued a 638
contract. Both of these results are examples of tribal capacity vacuums.

Jurisdictional Complexities Prevent Strategic Planning

The Major Crimes Act of 1885, which places jurisdiction for most serious
crimes with Federal agencies, also works to diffuse authority and
accountability for criminal justice policy and management in Indian
Country. The Act arose from the Supreme Court's decision in Ex parte
Crow Dog (109 U.S. 556 (1883)). In Crow Dog, the Supreme Court held
that the U.S. District Court of South Dakota lacked jurisdiction over a
Sioux Indian who already had been punished by his tribe for killing
another Indian. Congress, which considered the punishment far too
lenient, responded to the Supreme Court's decision by quickly passing the
Act. As its title implies, the Major Crimes Act granted the Federal
Government jurisdiction over a number of crimes committed on Indian
reservations, including murder, kidnapping, rape, and robbery. It now also
covers arson, assault, maiming, larceny, receiving stolen property,
manslaughter, attempted homicide, conspiracy to commit murder, and
statutory rape (U.S. Code, Title 18).

Besides the obvious loss of sovereignty, an important implication of Crow
Dog is that the development of comprehensive, tribally driven crime
strategies--such as those relating to serious youth violence, drug-related
crime, child abuse, domestic violence, or sexual assault--now depends on
shared priorities or the sustained attention of Federal agencies, since so
many of these crimes fall under Federal jurisdiction. Not only must tribes
engage the BIA in developing responses to crime, they must also engage
the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office, and the Federal courts. When control
of policy and management is so divided, tribes feel they have neither the
opportunity nor the obligation to develop their own approaches to
policing.

The 638 Process Diverts Tribes From the Consideration of Community
Priorities and Goals

Theoretically, the 638 contracting process should provide tribes with the
opportunity to design police departments and implement policing
procedures that are well matched to tribal needs, resources, values, and
priorities. In practice, however, this has not been the case, and examples of
tribes that have used this opportunity to carefully consider the police
function are exceedingly rare, for several reasons. First, as detailed above,
tribes enter the process without adequate planning capacities and,
therefore, are unable to use 638 planning as a means of furthering their
own goals. Second, the contracting process is focused on implementing
policing on the most basic level. From the Federal Government's
standpoint, the contract must address basic operational, organizational, and
personnel issues and must provide a stream of funding to support these
functions, so that the core police services once provided by the BIA can
now be provided by the tribe. But neither the contract process nor the
contract itself focuses on building planning capacity on the tribal level,
strategic planning on the departmental level, or systematically considering
tribally driven criteria (such as resources, needs, values, and priorities) in
designing a department that functions as a core institution of tribal
government.

These issues were clear impediments in two of the communities we
visited. As noted above, over the course of 3 or 4 years of planning, Gila
River Indian Community's government had charged several bodies with
the planning task for contracting, including the Law Enforcement
Commission and, finally, a special planning committee headed by the
assistant community manager. Concordant with the Federal Government's
focus on operational, organizational, personnel, and funding issues, these
groups had few, if any, members with policing expertise; saw the 638
contract primarily as a stream of funding to acquire, rather than as an
opportunity to plan how the Community itself hoped to be policed; and did
not provide for an ongoing strategic review of the department's progress
toward Community goals. Similarly, the Three Affiliated Tribes'
government had long declined to enter into a 638 contract, largely because
they did not see the 638 process as an opportunity to regain traditional
methods of social control, but rather as a means of entering "the law
enforcement business."

Federal Management and the Influence of the Professional Model
Discourage Community Partnership

While the lack of planning capacity hampers the development of effective
police institutions, the continued control of police policy and management
by the Federal Government (for tribes with BIA departments) and the
lingering effect of the professional model of policing (for tribes with
departments under 638 contracts) generate a more fundamental flaw in
policing in Indian Country. To better understand this flaw, we consider the
underlying philosophy of policing in a free society.

Specifically, communities grant police tremendous power--the power to
detain, to arrest, and even to use deadly force. Communities do this
because they rightly place a high value on what police do in protecting
freedom and keeping communities safe. This is a contract between
communities and police (Goldstein 1977). But Native American
communities have not participated in designing their own police
institutions and then consented to be policed by those methods.
Departments administered by the BIA are not agents of tribes but of the
Federal Government and, as such, have no incentive to ask the
communities they serve for legitimacy or for authorization of the police
function. Even those departments operating under self-determination
contracts adopted--as a byproduct of the contracting process--the
organization and methods of the professional era of policing. They look
primarily to the law and to external professional standards for
authorization, rather than to the community. This has created a significant
gap between tribal police and the communities they serve, a gap that is
reflected in mismatches between police and community priorities and
between police methods and tribal norms and values.

Several examples may illustrate what this means. The first comes from
Tohono O'odham, where we found that one of the most successful
strategies for reducing youth violence was formulated by the local Drug
Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) officer.[5] This program had an
especially productive, though unintended, result. It gave the D.A.R.E.
officer an opportunity to simply talk with students. To an outsider, the
long meetings and discussions typical of the Tohono O'odham can seem
unproductive, but for the D.A.R.E officer, this culturally appropriate
activity helped him build strong relationships with youth. In fact, many of
the tribal members we spoke with described the ideal O'odham officer as
one who simply talked--talked with people to understand their motivation
for committing crimes, to find a solution to problems, and to quietly but
firmly persuade those involved to implement that solution. Significantly,
however, few members of the police department looked on this activity as
falling within the definition of "real" police work, although they pointed to
interventions the D.A.R.E. officer had developed as among the most
effective crime prevention strategies present on the reservation. Because
vestiges of the professional model of policing determined Tohono
O'odham police officers' methods, the fact that this officer's approach to
problem solving had a strong fit with tribal norms and values had gone
largely unrecognized.

At the Flathead reservation, several communities had called upon the
police for an increased presence, in one case to control drug marketing and
in another to prevent cars from speeding along the side roads on which
children walked to school. In the first instance, residents used 911 to
complain about the drug-marketing activity, but the police response
proved inadequate--a squad car either arrived on the scene too late or
arrived only to break up a single deal, and these responses did not affect
violator behavior. The local Indian housing authority finally addressed
community concerns by hiring as a resident manager a tribal officer who
had been detailed to the Federal drug enforcement task force. Besides
prominently parking a police vehicle outside his home (which was near the
usual site of drug-selling activities), the officer organized community
meetings. The group of resident activists that emerged from these
meetings organized a Neighborhood Watch, neighborhood cleanups, and a
storage-shed building day. With these interventions, the community
transformed itself from being the least desirable housing project on the
reservation to one of the most desirable.

In the second instance, community members also organized meetings, but
they were more effective on the political level. Council members, the
Tribal Chairwoman, and other members of the executive branch explicitly
asked the police to become more involved in that particular town and with
the community in general. In a Council meeting we attended, one Council
member admonished the police chief, "We don't want you just picking up
more people on Highway 93."[6]

In discussions with us, the Chairwoman explained, "The Council would
like to see more community involvement and partnership, so people don't
just see [the police] in times of crisis. Instead of just traffic [enforcement],
we'd like to see more focus on community participation--a presence in the
community, talking to people, assisting them, [involving themselves] in
education and community activities."[7] To their credit, the Confederated
Tribes' police officers and police leadership told us both of these stories;
however, they stressed that doing more to meet community requests for
involvement was beyond their official function. Again, police
responsiveness was constrained by the professional model of police work
and by the fact that, customarily, Indian police departments are not
organized and managed to turn to the community for authorization and
direction.

More generally, we found at most sites that tribal citizens rely increasingly
on police and on the courts to settle disputes and problems that not so long
ago might have been mediated by neighbors, elders, tribal leadership, or
other traditional means. These problems--disputes between neighbors,
family quarrels, abandoned and disorderly properties, and unsupervised
youth--are more closely linked to the quality of community life than they
are to conventional definitions of crime. Police cited the rapidly increasing
burden on 911 systems as the product of this phenomenon, and tribal
criminal and civil attorneys complained that their caseloads have
ballooned beyond reason. On the one hand, police protest that the
community demands that they solve too many problems that are not really
crimes. On the other hand, citizens complain that police do not respond to
the real needs of the community.

It is probably unjust to blame such conflicting expectations solely on
police policy. The erosion of traditional culture has also contributed to the
problem. The mechanisms of social control that might be brought to bear
on noncrime problems are simply fewer and weaker; thus tribal
communities ask more of their police. Yet even this has a connection to
Federal policy (although this time to broad policy objectives, not policing
policy specifically). Through at least the 1960s, Federal procedures
exacerbated the loss of cultural knowledge, discouraged community
problem solving, and helped create an expectation that someone else
should deal with difficult problems. For example, individuals with
substance abuse problems were sent to off-reservation treatment centers;
economically productive adults were offered relocation to job-rich urban
areas; housing programs aimed at nuclear families separated extended
family groups; children were sent to distant boarding schools; and, even
after the general demise of boarding schools, children were removed from
poor families and placed in long-term off-reservation foster care. As a
result, culturally appropriate means of social problem solving have been
displaced, and incentives to adapt those methods to contemporary times
and current problems have been suppressed.

In many tribal communities, residents have no one to turn to for help with
a wide range of issues except their law enforcement agencies. A telling
example came from the Director of the Juvenile Detention and
Rehabilitation Center in the Gila River Indian Community, who told us
that she (and the tribal police) regularly received phone calls from parents
requesting that the police arrest, and the juvenile facility house, a problem
child. Because these parents had little experience of being parented
themselves, she concluded, their own parenting skills were extremely
limited.

However, when tribal members do turn to the police with their problems,
they encounter organizations whose priorities have been shaped by a
model of policing that limits responses to a narrow band of strategies and
attention to a narrow band of crime problems. For example, the acting
Pima Agency Superintendent at the time of our first site visit (the nominal
head of the then-BIA police department) stated, "Law enforcement is law
enforcement"--a claim that seems to exempt Indian police departments
from adapting their strategies, policies, and procedures to local needs. As a
result, disputes, conflicts, and problems that police and citizens see as each
other's responsibility can continue to simmer and, eventually, escalate into
real crimes. In addition, as tribal members conclude that the police are
insensitive and unresponsive to community needs, support for the police
diminishes. This, of course, further isolates police and communities from
each other, and, in its worst form, the isolation develops into barely
concealed hostility.[8] Partnership is not possible in such an atmosphere.

Research on Effective Governing Institutions in Indian Country

A substantial body of research suggests a roadmap for understanding and
beginning to remedy the problems with policing that are rooted in Federal
policy. Beginning in the 1970s, given the opportunity of increased self-
determination offered by PL 93-638, a handful of Indian nations embarked
on successful paths of social and economic development. Research by the
Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development indicates
that the common denominator among these successful tribes was an
effective government--one that was capable of both determining and
implementing the policy priorities of the community.

Data from the last U.S. Census (exhibit 8) illustrate the diversity in
reservation performance that underlies the Harvard Project research. On
paper, the Crow are one of the wealthiest societies in the world. They own
vast coal resources, extensive timber supplies, rich wheat-growing land,
and arguably the best grazing grass in the West. In the last decade, they
have also received significant infusions of financial capital--totaling well
over $100 million--through a number of highly remunerative legal
settlements. The Tribe's emphasis on education gives it a rate of high
school graduation that is well above the average for Natives living on
reservations. Yet, the community's physical, financial, and human capital
generates a negligible annual return, and the reservation unemployment
rate is in the 80-90 percent range.[9] By contrast, some tribal communities
have been booming economically and making rapid social progress. For
example, the Mississippi Choctaw's home in Philadelphia, Mississippi, is
hardly rich in natural resources, but the Tribe is now one of the largest
employers in Mississippi. More than 3,000 non-Indians commute daily to
work in the Choctaw's manufacturing, service, and public-sector
enterprises.[10] All other things equal, the different outcomes these two
nations have experienced can be attributed largely to differences in
government effectiveness.

The Harvard Project's research shows that one indicator of a tribal
government's ability to effectively make and implement decisions is
whether or not it has increased control over its own institutions (seizing de
facto sovereignty, and not merely de jure). Stability, the separation of
powers, and competent, respected bureaucracies are further indicators of a
tribal government's effectiveness. The research also indicates that an
alignment between the form and powers of a government's contemporary
institutions and the form and powers of its prereservation institutions is
most likely to create this stability, respect, and legitimacy. Yet that match
between present and prereservation political systems is not typical: The
U.S. Government created the 20th-century governments of most tribes,
overriding indigenous institutions. In cases where tribes were fortunate
enough to avoid imposed constitutions or where, fortuitously, the imposed
structure is well matched to prereservation forms, tribes are performing
well; but where the match is poor, tribes are struggling.[11]

With reference to Indian policing, the first important lesson from this
research is the effect of increased tribal control over tribal institutions.
Only those tribes that have acquired meaningful control over their
governing institutions--that have increased their actual sovereignty--have
experienced improved local economic and social conditions. The research
has not found a single case of sustained economic development where the
tribe is not in the driver's seat. While tribal-BIA relationships in thriving
Indian nations range from cooperative to contentious, they are all
characterized by a demotion of the BIA (and of other Federal agencies)
from decisionmaker to advisor and provider of technical assistance. The
reason sovereignty is crucial to successful development is clear: As long
as the BIA (or any other outside organization) has decisionmaking
authority, the actions, policies, and procedures of tribal government will
reflect outsiders' agendas. For example, the BIA's bureaucratic standards
of success (protecting a budget, expanding authority) will tend to be given
more weight than tribal standards, and results that meet these external
standards will be considered successful even if they lead to lost
opportunities, failed policies, or other bad outcomes for a tribe. Without
tribal sovereignty over the institutions of government, there is an injurious
separation between the recipients of policy benefits and the bearers of
policy costs. An important study of tribes' timber harvesting enterprises--
some operated directly by the BIA, others by tribes themselves under PL
93-638 contracts--provides hard evidence of this claim. When tribes
replaced the BIA administration of forestry enterprises with their own
management, institutional and economic performance improved. As
predicted, tribes operated their timber programs more efficiently than the
BIA and received better prices for the products sold (Krepps and Caves
1994; also, Krepps 1992).

As discussed, the Federal policies that regulate Indian policing have the
twin effect of reducing tribal control and diffusing accountability for
institutional performance. In our interviews, tribes regularly blamed
Federal agencies for the poor state of policing in Indian Country; not only
were the resources provided by Federal agencies inadequate, but it also
appeared that Federal policies were driven by a misreading of tribes' real
needs and priorities. On the other hand, representatives of Federal agencies
expressed skepticism about the ability and intention of tribes to develop
and manage effective police departments.

The truth is a mixture of these impressions. The very fact that power is
shared between tribal and Federal authorities allows each to avoid their
more appropriate roles and, thus, to perpetuate poor policing. By contrast,
if police perform poorly in the typical American city, the citizenry signal
their leadership that performance must improve. If conditions do not
change, elected officials and police executives are at serious risk of being
replaced. In Indian Country, this direct line of accountability and control is
often absent. As in other areas of Indian policy, it is both appropriate and
beneficial for tribal political and police department leaders to take on those
tasks; the more appropriate Federal roles are to provide advice, technical
assistance, and financial aid and to support effective local policing efforts.

An additional observation that emerges from this line of inquiry concerns
timing. The legal and de facto sovereignty of tribes has been subject to
constant challenge, and it is frequently asserted that if a tribe wishes to be
sovereign, it must first establish a sound, nondependent economy. A
similar assertion is often made with regard to policing: If an Indian
community wants greater authority over criminal justice administration, it
must first demonstrate the ability to responsibly manage its own criminal
justice institutions. But Harvard Project research indicates that this
reasoning is backward. Sovereignty brings with it accountability: Being in
charge makes tribal leaders and tribal citizens realize that their own
resources and well-being are at stake (Kalt 1997).

The second important lesson for Indian policing from the Harvard Project
research is the importance of cultural match. Exhibit 9 summarizes the
general research findings. For each Indian nation listed, it presents the
contemporary form of government, whether or not this structure matches
prereservation form, and whether or not the reservation economy is
growing. For example, the economically prosperous community of Cochiti
Pueblo has never given up its traditional theocracy and has no written
constitution. At the other extreme, modern Crow government bears little
or no resemblance to the hierarchical and two-branch governmental
structure of prereservation Crow society, and economic conditions on the
Crow reservation, as discussed above, are dismal. While this list is not
exhaustive, the pattern is strong enough to suggest that match matters. A
consonance between present and prereservation institutional forms confers
legitimacy on the methods and outcomes of government decisionmaking
and channels political energy in productive directions.

Two examples from business and government relations illustrate the
dynamics of cultural match. These examples highlight the aspect of
government structure that appears to be most important for institutional
legitimacy and effectiveness: coherence between institutional rules and
citizens' jointly held expectations about who should hold authority, how it
should be exercised, and what the decisionmaking structure should be.

The central government of the Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge
Reservation has sometimes tried to launch tribally owned businesses,
which are relatively common in Indian Country. Yet in Lakota political
culture, allegiance to authority is located at the subtribal level of the
reservation's districts (political divisions that more closely replicate the
quasi-autonomous family bands, or tiyospaye, of prereservation days).
Time and time again, when a financial or management crisis arises for a
business promulgated by the central government, the lack of connection to
appropriate authority structures causes oversight mechanisms to fail,
support for the enterprise to wither, and an eventual business failure.[12]

Among the White Mountain Apache, the formal role of the Tribe's chief
executive includes being the lead negotiator of external agreements with
businesses and other governments. When a dispute arose between the
Tribe and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) about appropriate
means for species protection, the Tribal Chairman gathered a team of
advisors and negotiated directly with the USFWS on behalf of the Tribe.
Today, because cultural norms support this activist, "presidential"
leadership role (in fact, the Apache word for "leader" has been variously
interpreted as "our smart one," "he who directs," or "he who convinces
us") (Cornell and Kalt 1995, 420),13 tribal politicians, wildlife biologists,
enterprise managers, and citizens are willing to exert together the effort
required to make this historic agreement work ("Tribe, U.S. Fish &
Wildlife Sign Historic Agreement" 1994; Wald 1995).

To reiterate, these positive and negative outcomes result from matches and
mismatches between indigenous and imposed norms and values. Unless
there is a match between these factors, the imposed norms and values will
consistently generate conflicts with customary ways of doing business
across social, political, and economic dimensions of reservation life. We
observed the same effects with respect to policing. The police officer at
Tohono O'odham or Gila River who aggressively confronts a suspect not
only will have offended longstanding tribal norms, but also will have
failed to draw on them in the service of obtaining the suspect's
compliance. By contrast, the police officer at Turtle Mountain or one of
the Lakota tribes who fails to confront a suspect is guilty of the same error.
To the extent that the ethos of the organization in which these officers
work mandates or otherwise perpetuates such conflicts, both public
support for and the effectiveness of the organization are diminished.

A final note about cultural match deserves attention: It is important not to
be naive about the possibilities. While research shows the potential that
match has to contribute to institutional success, there are, unfortunately, no
guarantees that prereservation institutions will be effective in a
contemporary setting. A society might find itself with institutions that are
firmly grounded in cultural norms and yet confront an environment that
renders those institutions ineffective. If old forms cannot be adapted to
modern problems, a new institution will be necessary. Then, the challenge
to the group is to design one that both makes cultural sense and works.
Building a legitimate institution that can meet contemporary challenges is
the overarching goal.

In summary, two lines of evidence, one based on a careful examination of
the impact of Federal policy on Indian policing and the other based on the
effectiveness of governing institutions in Indian Country generally,
support this conclusion: The ongoing dominance of the BIA and other
Federal agencies on policing in Indian Country has diffused accountability
for Indian policing, limited tribal capacity to improve policing, deterred
tribes from strategic and long-term planning, discouraged community
priority setting, and prevented tribal communities and police departments
from aligning their priorities, values, and resources. The severity of these
issues varies across tribes and, individually, their influence may appear
subtle. In combination, however, they have a powerful negative effect on
the overall quality of policing in Indian Country. Moreover, they are
concerns that an examination of Indian policing based only on crime
trends, management issues, and budget constraints fails to bring into focus.

Notes

1. Hagan (1961, 1980) and Peak (1989), for example, both note that
reservations were extremely violent places, where natural mechanisms of
social control were disrupted and armed bands preyed on the weak.

2. 24 Stat. 388, also known as the Dawes Act (see Canby 1998, 22).

3. Kelling and Moore (1998) coined the phrase "political model."
Fogelson (1977) discusses the alliance of police with urban political
machines (chapter 1).

4. An "agency" is the smallest BIA administrative unit. Most large Indian
nations have a dedicated agency; smaller nations are grouped together or
attached to an agency that primarily serves a larger nation. This structure
adds to the problems cited in the text--in multitribe agencies, authority
over a single tribe's patrol function quickly devolves to a tribal outsider
whose interests and responsibilities are extremely diffuse.

5. Project D.A.R.E. is a school-based substance abuse prevention program
that is taught by specially trained police officers in schools across the
United States and in other countries.

6. Meeting of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Council, July
16, 1997.

7. Interview with the Chairwoman, Confederated Salish and Kootenai
Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, July 18, 1997.

8. For example, on ride-alongs we saw officers "patrol" by driving through
the front and back yards of homes, shining their floodlights into residents'
porches, kitchens, and living rooms.

9. As in the final column of exhibit 8, this rate has been adjusted to
account for those who are unemployed but have stopped actively seeking a
job.

10. It may be tempting to credit such phenomenal growth to gaming, a
niche market opportunity available to Indian nations because of their
political sovereignty. But the example of the Mississippi Choctaw is
telling: Economic growth started in the 1980s, long before July 1994,
when the Tribe opened its casino. Furthermore, Harvard Project research is
general enough to suggest that although gaming may contribute significant
financial capital to some Native economies, even casinos thrive only when
they are underwritten by the basic supports of effective governance.

11. This point is based on research by Stephen Cornell and Joseph P. Kalt,
especially Cornell and Kalt (1995). The independent variable "match" was
derived by comparing tribes' immediate prereservation governmental
systems (as documented in ethnographic sources) with their current
systems. Prereservation Indian societies can be characterized as self-
governing societies that had passed the tests of environmental adaptation
to that point in time; thus, the indigenous, diverse cultures of the tribes
were embedded in their political systems.

12. One dramatic example of this dynamic is described in "Nebraska
Sioux Lean Beef," a teaching case study about a meat-packing plant
(Jorgensen 1990).

13. Original sources of quotes are Grenville Goodwin, The Social
Organization of the Western Apache (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1942); Morris E. Opler, "Lipan Apache Culture," Southern Journal
of Anthropology 9(1953): 92-95; and Tribal Cultural Director, White
Mountain Apache Tribe, personal interview, 1987.

------------------------------

Chapter 6. Conclusions and Recommendations

The preceding chapters demonstrate that the task of policing in Indian
Country is difficult and complex. Reservation police confront significant
crime problems and an array of related social concerns. They struggle
under the pressures of limited resources, answer to multiple authorities,
and function within a complicated jurisdictional web. Departments
frequently operate without strategic direction from their tribal
governments and lack methods for communicating directly with their
service population, deficiencies that limit their knowledge of and ability to
address community goals. Consequently, it can be difficult for police in
Indian Country to generate community support for--let alone partnership
in--their activities. These problems, concerns, and challenges have a
substantial effect on the quality and effectiveness of policing in Indian
Country.

We argue that many of these issues are linked in important ways to
Federal policy. Certainly, there is strong evidence of long, cumulative
negative effects of Federal policy on the practice of policing in Indian
Country. The historical record shows how Federal policy created a system
that served the interests of the U.S. Government and nontribal citizens and
failed to promote the ability of Indian nations to design and exert
meaningful control over their own policing institutions.

Reversing this failure through the creation of more indigenous policing
institutions may give Indian police departments purchase on many of the
problems they face. Two important bodies of research and experience
inform this conclusion and the recommendations to tribal and nontribal
policymakers that follow from it. The first body of information, discussed
in depth above and summarized below, demonstrates the influence that
appropriate and effective governing institutions have on the successful
development of reservation societies (recognizing that police constitute a
governing institution of central importance). The second body of
information, which describes the experiences of communities whose
police departments practice "community policing," is introduced below.
These two distinct bodies of research--with strikingly similar conclusions-
-provide critical lessons for building a foundation for policing in Indian
Country, a foundation that ensures strong public support for the police
function and that effectively leverages a wide range of resources (not just
funding, but political, social, and cultural capital as well) in the service of
addressing crime.

Before proceeding, we highlight an important aspect of our work: While
we are critical of past Federal policy, we assert that Federal agencies can
play a useful future role in assisting tribes as they build a new foundation
for policing. Many Federal agencies are directing increased attention and
considerable resources to efforts to better protect tribal communities from
crime and to better support tribal criminal justice agencies.[1] The BIA has
made substantial progress in improving training and practice, especially
with regard to the investigative function. Police professionals within the
BIA's Division of Law Enforcement Services possess significant resources
in terms of experience and expertise. Many processes already in place,
such as the 638 contracting process, could be modified to assist tribes as
they undertake efforts to fundamentally rethink policing. The following
recommendations suggest how these resources can best be used to improve
policing in Indian Country.

Reprise of Research on Effective Governing Institutions

Research on Indian economies indicates that economic and social
problems can be solved only if tribes first focus on building strong and
effective governing institutions. This task properly begins with increasing
tribal control of institutions, an activity that has been part and parcel of
tribes' drive for substantially increased sovereignty--which has itself been
the dominant political force in Indian Country over the last three decades.
Thus, it is no coincidence that many of the tribes that have been most
active in reclaiming sovereignty are also those that have most successfully
combated the problems of poverty.

The research on Indian economies further concludes that institutional
design affects institutional effectiveness. Strong and effective governing
institutions reflect the values and priorities (the culture) of the community.
This match increases the probability that the population will support the
methods and outcomes of government action.

In general, Indian policing has continued on a trajectory outside of the
national movement toward increased tribal sovereignty.[2] Likewise, the
idea that institutions might be tailored to fit tribal conceptions of the
appropriate methods for social control is not common among Indian police
and policymakers. Yet if tribes took greater control over the management
and design of policing, it is likely that, as in the economic sphere, their
criminal justice institutions would become more effective. Parallel to the
research findings on Indian economies, some of the major benefits of
greater self-determination and cultural match in policing might include the
following:

 o Focused accountability.

 o Increased likelihood of a consonance between the capabilities of
policing institutions and the demands made on them by the social, cultural,
and political environments in which they operate.

 o Increased public support for the police mission.

The Possibilities for Community Policing in Indian Country

"Community policing is a problem-solving partnership between the police
and the community that is incorporated throughout a police department's
culture and operations. In community policing, the police and the
community collaboratively analyze problems, set operational priorities,
and implement strategies appropriate for the resolution of each problem"
(Michaelson, Kelling, and Wasserman 1988). In other words, because
community policing is a method by which communities lend their
authority to the police enterprise, see their norms and values (their culture)
reflected in the police mission, and employ their considerable formal and
informal resources to address crime and other social concerns, it gives rise
to institutions that have the important characteristics cited above-- self-
determination and cultural appropriateness. Experience and research show
that the community policing strategy enhances the capacity of police to
address crime and to help communities become strong, independent, and
resourceful. It leads to more effective policing (see, for example, Sparrow,
Moore, and Kennedy 1990; Perspectives on Policing 1988-1993; Moore
and Poethig 1998). In sum, the growing body of experience and research
on community policing is remarkably congruent with the findings on
effective governing institutions in Indian Country. We conclude that
community policing provides a framework that tribes might use to design
and implement Native approaches to policing--approaches that should
improve the quality of policing in Indian Country and, rather than
perpetuate an inappropriate Federal structure, enhance tribal nation
building.

A department practices community policing by supporting police officers
in the activities that communities most demand of them, not only in the
narrow band of activities that constitute reactive crime fighting.
Departments implement community policing by promoting a broader
definition of the police function than is permitted in the professional
approach. In this definition, an improved quality of community life
becomes a desirable outcome of good police service, which means that
such activities as order maintenance, conflict resolution, and problem
solving become acceptable and important police duties.

The results of this broader definition are significant. For example,
practices that bring police into close contact with the public have always
been politically popular, but research shows that they are advantageous in
other ways as well. They contribute to community life, reduce fear,
increase citizen satisfaction with police, improve police attitudes toward
citizens, and increase the morale and job satisfaction of police
(Trojanowicz 1982). Similarly, police activities that both engage citizens
in solving problems and provide citizens with new tools (such as conflict
resolution capacities) contribute to community strength, independence,
and resourcefulness (Goldstein 1990). Establishing and following
practices with these wider effects is a central task of the community
policing approach.

The broader definition of the police function also helps align police
priorities and values with those of the community (which, as we have
seen, is rarely the case in Indian Country). In large part, the alignment
occurs as the source of authorization for police activities shifts from
professional or bureaucratic standards to the citizens being policed. Where
community policing is already practiced, police have realized that
ambiguity inevitably surrounds the new kinds of police activity and that,
to make their interventions effective, they must regularly seek
authorization from citizens. Police departments have learned that
professional or bureaucratic authority--especially that which tends to
isolate police and insulate them from community or neighborhood
influences--decreases as citizens contribute more to defining problems and
identifying solutions. In this sense, community policing relies on an
intimate relationship between police and citizens, a relationship that is
determined less by past practice than by the particular attributes of the
community to be policed. The tight linkage between police action and
citizen authorization is also a locale-specific application of a broader idea
in law enforcement that "behind the badge is the Constitution." That is, to
be legitimate in the eyes of citizens, the actual ways in which police
maintain order, resolve conflicts, and solve problems must themselves
uphold the priorities, norms, and values of the community.

Police departments implementing community policing have found that
community concerns are often important indicators of ongoing, underlying
problems that might escalate into crimes if ignored. Today, community
policing's problem-solving approach and attention to order maintenance
are widely recognized as playing important roles in communities' efforts to
rebuild their neighborhoods and in increasing the quality of community
life.[3]

The non-Native experience with community policing and data from our
site visits suggest that community policing has great promise in Indian
Country. For example, many tribal citizens rely increasingly on their
police departments to settle disputes, conflicts, and problems that police
themselves do not consistently treat as legitimate crime problems. The
overarching lesson of community policing is that if reservation police
were to pay attention to these problems and were to use credible tribal
approaches as remedies, they would become more effective problem
solvers, more respected by tribal citizens, and better able to "nip in the
bud" problems with the potential to escalate into more serious crimes.

Despite the success of community policing, it is not a wholesale
prescription for transforming police departments and eliminating crime.
Nonetheless, we conclude that, by changing the foundation on which
policing occurs, community policing is the appropriate first step for
improving policing in Indian Country. For any given Indian nation, the
systems that animate and guide policing--such as the organizational
structures of the police department and overall criminal justice system, the
tribal personnel and training systems, the local management information
and control systems, and the tribal agencies that conduct strategic
planning--can be linked to a vision of policing shaped by that nation's
needs, beliefs, priorities, and resources.[4] The tribe's policing institutions
would then become more indigenous (or self-determined), more likely to
build upon and reinforce important cultural norms and values, and more
valuable to the community.

Changing an Indian police department's policies and procedures is one
practical way that this linkage between policing systems and tribal
priorities might occur. Depending on the dispatcher's assessment of a call,
for example, a local elder or other accepted authority could accompany the
responding officer; in many instances, the officer might be there only to
support the elder's authority (or vice versa). Such an effort would
simultaneously lend credibility to the modern police function and show
respect for important tribal traditions. Similarly, if a tribal value is to talk
things out (as in O'odham culture), new policies and procedures might
specify situations in which this approach would be appropriate and offer
guidelines for ensuring that such conversations were effective.[5] Different
policies and procedures could be developed for cultures in which the
direct, physical assertion of authority is appropriate (the Turtle Mountain
Chippewa might fit this description); the challenge would be to develop
guidelines that made the physical exercise of authority controlled and also
effective in maintaining order.

Another approach might be to modify both the organization of a
department and its personnel system to reflect tribal culture. In many of
the interviews we conducted at Fort Berthold, interviewees mourned the
decline of the Black Mouth Society, an association of respected, mature
men who historically acted as the police for these tribes. A practical
arrangement that would strengthen important traditional values, draw on
the cultural power of the Society for greater authority, and still meet
modern needs might be a two-tier department in which junior officers
serve an apprenticeship under the supervision of tenured, highly
experienced, and well-qualified senior officers (in effect, a Black Mouth
Society) (Bowers 1992; Gilman and Schneider 1987; Lowie 1903[6]). The
selection, promotion, and evaluation of officers could be geared not only
to their ability to carry out the conventional functions of policing
(conducting good investigations, driving safely, making arrests), but also
to their fitness to serve as members of the Society.

In reflecting on this description of community policing and its possible
application in Indian Country, we emphasize that the model is not a tactic
or set of tactics but, rather, a process by which police work with
communities to establish shared priorities, to support community efforts to
address crime, and to obtain the authorization of communities to act on
their behalf. Thus, a department practicing community policing is
characterized not merely by a set of general tactics, such as neighborhood
foot patrols or stable geographic beats, but by the fact that it has found
multiple (and usually locale-specific) ways to encourage officers to pay
attention to citizens' priorities and values, to respond to the fears citizens
feel in the face of certain social problems and crimes, and to employ
programs that emphasize collaboration between citizens and police. Even
so, the confusion between tactics and process (sometimes called strategy
or philosophy) has discouraged police in Indian Country from moving
beyond the professional approach to using the community policing
approach in the manner we describe. On numerous occasions, police
leadership and policymakers working in Indian Country informed us that
staff shortages coupled with the tremendous distances characteristic of
western reservations--that is, obstacles to tactics--make community
policing an impractical goal. In our view, however, community policing
can be implemented in practical ways that do not compromise the
effectiveness of police. It should not require excessive funds and should
not reduce a department's ability to carry out its mission. Instead, existing
departmental values, priorities, and resources can be reoriented to
community values, priorities, and resources. Misunderstandings about the
requirements of community policing should not be allowed to stand in the
way of its implementation (see Kennedy 1993; Sparrow 1988).

What the Federal Government Can Do

We recommend that the Federal Government pursue a more fully
developed and more cohesive policy of self-determination in Indian
policing. This approach requires amending several important Federal
programs and activities, including the 638 contracting process, the way
various agencies invest in policing in Indian Country, the training of BIA
and other Indian Country police, and the administration of law
enforcement within the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Our specific
recommendations follow.

The Federal contracting process is a crucial program to which changes
should be made. Contracting should be about more than gaining control of
a stream of money, and we therefore think that the process should
emphasize not only tribal management (the present focus) but also
organizational planning. Because contracted police departments do not
need to replicate the BIA departments they replace, the contracting process
should encourage tribes to rethink the way policing occurs. To do this, the
Federal Government may need to invest directly in qualitative change.
One possibility is to offer police department and political planners
incentives to explore the specific implications of community policing for
their department, tribal government, and nation and to pursue
organizational change based on the findings. Yet, any amendments to PL
93-638 policy should avoid making the requirements for contracting more
stringent. We believe that tribes can think best about policing when they
control policing; thus, Federal contracting policy should offer assistance in
ways that both improve policing and promote sovereignty.[7]

Contracting is only one channel by which the Federal Government invests
in Indian Country policing. Indeed, many departments and agencies of the
Federal Government invest in Indian Country policing, and the way they
do so is important. Past investment activities have tended to have an ad
hoc quality, and while many have had positive effects, a more coherent
investment policy could increase the usefulness of future spending.

We propose that two related principles guide Federal spending (regardless
of the department or agency initiating the funding) on policing in Indian
Country. First, investments should strengthen tribal managers' ability to
think in new ways about policing. That is, investments should encourage
both departmental and political managers to address critical questions:

 o How does and how should policing promote the nation's goals to be
more resourceful and independent?

 o What policing strategies are particularly effective at accomplishing this?

 o What tribal norms and values should be embodied in tribal policing
practices?

 o How can tribal political and police department leaders ensure that this
happens?

Second, investments should strengthen tribal capacity to form and
administer police departments that are more self-determined. As noted
with respect to contracting, investments should not only assist tribes
financially, but also increase their organizational and strategic capacity to
oversee reservation policing. Funding is particularly vital to help tribes
reform the organizational structure of their criminal justice systems (so
that, if desired, they can become less compartmentalized), rewrite police
policies and procedures (to create a culturally and task-appropriate set),
professionalize personnel systems (including recruitment, training, and
promotion requirements), and develop strategic planning entities.

Two examples reveal how investments that do not accord with these
principles may misdirect police department and political policymakers.
The first is Federal spending on technology. While the need to improve the
collection and management of information in Indian Country police
departments is pronounced, a warning is in order. The statistics that such
systems generate emphasize only one part of the police mission--fighting
crime. Other roles that police might play in promoting community values
and ensuring order and security are deemphasized. In other words, isolated
investments in policing technology can lead departmental and political
leaders away from the challenge of thinking in new ways about policing.
Tribes and Federal policymakers with an interest in community policing
(or any other approaches that generate new police roles and
responsibilities) must bear this outcome in mind and, if possible, support
investments in technology by funding activities that help connect the
information system to the tribe's other important policing goals.[8]

A second example is the response of national-level law enforcement
authorities to reports of rising crime in Indian Country: They have called
for the assignment of more Federal officers to Indian Country. These
officers are already making their presence felt. They are members of
Federal drug enforcement and antigang violence task forces, Border Patrol
officers, agents of the U.S. Attorney's Office, and FBI agents. While many
Indian police departments want the additional resources that an increased
Federal presence brings, many Indian communities see this increased
presence as a further loss of sovereignty (or even as an occupation). From
the standpoint of self-determination, such fractionated injections of
resources prevent tribes from developing truly comprehensive responses to
their social disorder and crime problems, especially as they are
complicated by offense and geographical jurisdiction issues. It would be
better to spend the same money on Indian policing directly--so that a tribe
could develop its own targeted strategy for dealing with its particular
problems--and to have similar officers and agencies available to serve as
professional advisors and partners in the implementation of tribally driven
anticrime programs. The principles we propose push investment in this
more fruitful direction.[9]

Our final comment on investment is that increasing the impact of the
current flow of funds to Indian Country policing should not become an
argument for freezing or limiting investment. On the contrary, we believe
that funding should increase. In part, this is because police in Indian
Country operate with a limited resource base relative to the crime
problems they face. It is also because of long-term underinvestment in the
reservation criminal justice system overall.

Federal policy concerning the training of police officers serving Indian
Country must also change. Most of the training that tribal police receive is
provided through State police academies, which have little focus on either
community policing or the important economic, geographic, social, and
cultural features of policing in Indian Country. These deficits might be
eliminated by adjusting the current curriculum at the federally
administered Indian Policing Academy in Artesia, New Mexico, to support
the vision of tribal policing offered in this paper and by expanding the
number of academies to adequately serve all of Indian Country. At the
same time, we acknowledge that municipal, county, and State police are
often more comfortable working with Indian police (and vice versa) if they
have all attended the same training academy. If tribes continue to choose
to send their police to State academies, the Federal Government could
fund additional training in the self-determined approach to reservation
policing we describe. These courses could be included in the curricula of
State training academies or could simply be coordinated with the State
offerings. They must, however, be more than minor postscripts to State
curricula; they must provide substantive training that is appropriately
tailored to the demands of policing in Indian Country.[10]

A final Federal policy that deserves careful consideration (and possible
amendment) is the centralization of authority over all BIA law
enforcement functions in Area Offices and the elimination of any agency-
level control. While this reorganization eliminates the separate lines of
authority over criminal investigation and patrol that we criticized earlier
and might increase the professionalization of police management within
the BIA, tribes appear to appreciate access to a local reporting structure. In
fact, loss of local authority was an explicit issue for two of the four tribes
that we studied in depth. At Gila River, key tribal administrators protested
centralization, and their objections led to the early and untimely departure
of the acting BIA police captain charged with preparing the department for
contracting. At Fort Berthold, centralization led many community
members to agitate for contracting. It may be better for Area Office
policing supervisors--experienced officers themselves--to shift their focus
from managing policing for noncontracted tribes to serving as professional
advisors to all area tribes, so that they become real partners in the process
of rethinking reservation policing and implementing new, tribally driven
efforts.

What Tribes Can Do

Our primary recommendation to tribes has been laid out earlier: They
should pursue real self-determination in Indian policing. This is a process
in which Indian nations seek both the financial and organizational capacity
to oversee policing; find ways for the community, tribal leadership, and
police to think strategically about policing; and weave culturally
appropriate methods into policing. Significantly, the community policing
philosophy advocates a similar process. According to this approach,
reservation police and the tribal community "together analyze problems,
set operational priorities, and implement strategies appropriate for the
resolution of each problem" (Michaelson, Kelling, and Wasserman 1988).
Thus, our correlate recommendation is that Indian nations strive to
implement their own versions of community policing. We have a few
additional recommendations for tribes, which may increase the
effectiveness of new policing approaches. These recommendations
concern tribes' commitments to fairness and impartiality and their
responsibility for training.

First, we recommend that tribes commit themselves to developing
impartial police departments. Typically, reservation police are indicted for
not having this characteristic. In some cases, political, clan, and family
relationships influence police practice and policy. Many interviewees
claimed that ties of this nature between suspects and department members
often influenced the disposition of crimes. In other cases, political
dynamics drive the management of departments. For example, corrupt
tribal governments co-opt police departments to protect illegitimate
activities and enterprises from scrutiny or prosecution. Cases of nepotism
in hiring and promoting police officers and staff are also in evidence (see
Naranjo et al. 1996). Of course, these problems are similar in character and
frequency to those that plague small and large police departments outside
of Indian Country. For them, one important solution has been to develop
and publicize sound personnel policies--eliminating or minimizing
nepotism, for example--so that the department can maintain its credibility
among citizens and with other government agencies. Tribes would benefit
from similar policies.

Second, we recommend that tribes themselves take an active role in
training police officers. If the goals of tribal policing include preserving
and promoting important tribal norms and values, the training officers
receive at State or Federal academies is insufficient. Local police training
and education is necessary to give officers a better understanding of the
government and culture of the tribe they serve and a better idea of how
policing gives meaning to those principles. Tribe-specific research,
preferably conducted by tribal members and tribal police themselves, is
the only real way to meet this goal--although the Federal Government
could productively support this process in a number of ways, such as
direct financial support or various forms of technical assistance.

Conclusion

Our core conclusions and recommendations focus on a fundamental issue:
Tribes, with the support of the Federal Government, must reconsider the
foundations of policing on American Indian reservations. Our supporting
recommendations grow out of this fundamental issue and are relatively
simple. First, the lessons drawn by tribes, academics, and policymakers
from the research on and accumulating experience in community policing
and the design of effective governing institutions in Indian Country can
productively inform the development of Federal policy. Second, this same
evidence and experience provide the necessary starting points for tribes as
they undertake the task of rethinking policing. We do not recommend that
Federal and tribal policymakers direct their full attention and resources to
increased funding for reservation police departments, the development of
specialized crime-fighting task forces, and improved technology. Although
these activities have both appeal and short-term potential, in the long run,
they will add little to the ability of Indian police departments and tribal
communities to independently address the substantial problems they face.

In conclusion, neither community policing nor the research on the design
of effective governing institutions in Indian Country offers a wholesale
prescription for transforming police departments and eliminating crime.
Instead they provide a framework for linking research and action in
designing approaches to policing that both make cultural sense and work.
The overarching goal is the creation of legitimate policing institutions that
are capable of meeting contemporary challenges (which may be as
divergent as neighborhood disputes, family violence, and the manufacture
and sale of methamphetamines).

Two possible misinterpretations of this statement deserve mention. In
recommending that tribes rethink policing in the context of culture, we are
not recommending that they reflexively resurrect dormant prereservation
methods of social control and policing, nor are we giving a blanket
endorsement to the restorative justice policies now popular in many Indian
(and non-Indian) jurisdictions (Young 1995). Rather, our advice to tribes
is to create workable, nation-specific policing institutions and approaches
that are informed by traditional customs. The workability criterion means
that the policing policies and practices individual tribes develop must
recognize the reality of day-to-day life and politics in Indian Country and
must be capable of getting things done in this "real world." Police
department and political leadership should not be left vulnerable to
charges that they have failed to address modern crime problems (ranging
from gang violence to driving while under the influence of alcohol). Our
argument is simply that basing policing activities on a cultural foundation
is a powerful means of establishing legitimacy, and that when policing
activities are viewed by the population as legitimate, the police may
become more effective.[11]

The nation-specific criterion highlights the problem with implementing
restorative justice approaches across the board. Anthropological evidence
makes clear that while many Native American cultures employed such
approaches to ensure adherence to social norms, many others employed
strikingly authoritarian, retributive methods of social control. In sum,
establishing culturally appropriate policing means that, on a tribe-by-tribe
basis, Indian nations must make a substantial investment in identifying
social norms relevant to policing and the function and influence of these
norms in contemporary life. We feel that this can be accomplished only as
tribes make a strong, sustained commitment to fundamentally rethinking
their approach to policing.

Finally, we note that the ultimate success of rethinking policing--with an
eye toward increased self-determination, cultural appropriateness, and
Native approaches to community policing--depends on research. The
agenda must include research that helps identify the appropriate process
for undertaking this initiative on a tribal level (perhaps using lessons
learned from successful constitutional reform efforts) and research that
helps practitioners understand how the approach we advocate can be
reconciled both with the contemporary thicket of State and Federal
jurisdictional issues and with PL 83-280. Besides the cultural research
noted above, tribal-level research that focuses on strengthening tribal
managers' ability to think in new ways about policing and on helping
tribes' political and police department leaders ensure change will be
particularly important.

Notes

1. See, for example, Executive Committee for Indian Country Law
Enforcement Improvements (1997); National Institute of Justice Strategic
Planning Meeting on Crime and Justice Research in Indian Country,
Portland, Oregon, October 14-15, 1998; and Summit on Charting the
Future of Justice in Indian Country, Washington, D.C., October 28, 1997.

2. This is despite the fact that policing institutions are of such central
importance to government that indigenous administration should be a top
priority for tribes. On a fundamental theoretical level, the gift of people to
their sovereign government--and the defining right of government--is the
right to wield coercive power over the citizenry. It is impossible to be truly
sovereign without exercising real self-determination in policing. See
Hobbes (1651, especially chapter 17).

3. Examples of successful initiatives are found in Sparrow, Moore, and
Kennedy (1990); Kelling and Coles (1996); and Braga et al. (1999).

4. Again, it is important to note that critical elements of policing are
determined by the particular (or unique) attributes of a community and,
therefore, that community policing in Indian Country may look
dramatically different from tribe to tribe.

5. Many writers stress the importance of talking things out in O'odham
culture. Several sources are Joseph, Spicer, and Chesky (1949); King and
Jones (1974, 125-136); Teague (1993); and Underhill (1940, 1969). We
observe, however, that although both the Tohono O'odham and Akimel
O'odham have similar cultural roots, their recent history is quite different.
Thus, the two communities might find markedly different ways to
incorporate cultural values into their policing methods; the differences
would not imply that one group was less "Indian" or less "O'odham," but
would simply reflect modern cultural differences.

6. Also Cora Baker interview, above, note 29, chapter 4.

7. In the current political climate, this will be much more difficult than it
sounds. Since the autumn of 1998, Congressional budget battles have
slowed the implementation of new 638 and self-governance contracts.
Preventing contracting--either through overly strict contracting
requirements or a lack of funds--does Indian policing no good. In fact, it
perpetuates the negative influence of Federal policy on policing, by
allowing community needs and concerns to fester, department
management and facilities to deteriorate further, and "catch as catch can"
programs (drug enforcement or anti-gang violence programs, for example)
to take the place of comprehensive strategic planning.

8. With regard to management information systems, additional caveats are
important. First, increasing the availability of automated call management
and management information systems does not change the fact that much
of the data collected by these systems is of poor quality. The data can be
improved only by breaking down the social and cultural barriers that exist
between police and many tribal communities, and thought should be given
to this problem. Second, automated information systems will provide
needed information to tribes, but the technology and training that
accompany these systems must recognize that the typical department in
Indian Country is much smaller than its urban and suburban counterparts.
These small staffs could be easily swamped by demands expressed
through 911 systems, inhibiting their ability to do sound proactive
planning. On the other hand, small departments will benefit greatly from
systems that enable them to identify the truly high-priority calls and to
focus on the underlying problems driving crime. Third, both police
personnel and tribal leadership must be educated on how to best use the
data in the service of broad tribal goals.

9. The COPS program also places federally funded officers in Indian
Country, but because the tribe has great flexibility in how it uses these
officers, the program is less likely to divert police and tribal policymakers
from their most important tasks. As noted in chapter 4, the problems with
the COPS program are much different in nature: Its restrictions on Federal
employment create a dual authority structure in BIA-managed departments
and further complicate oversight issues; the lack of training and equipment
funds in COPS grants may create a group of officers with inferior
capacities; and the statute's sunset clause and lack of specific phase-out
provisions will severely test the already limited resources of Indian police
departments and, thus, have a larger impact in Indian Country than
elsewhere.

10. Notably, this discussion also implies that State-level changes in
training will be necessary. Whether or not tribal police attend State
academies, those institutions must inform their students of the
appropriateness of Indian self-determination over policing and of the
professionalism of Indian police. Police graduating from State academies
must be prepared to work with all of their colleagues--in-State, out-of-
State, Federal, and tribal.

11. Of course, the opposite configuration also presents a problem.
Workable but illegitimate institutions are as unhelpful as legitimate but
unworkable ones. If a department makes a limited set of cosmetic changes
that leave in place old ways of doing business--no matter how functional--
it will not succeed in better aligning the efforts of police departments with
community priorities.

------------------------------

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------------------------------

Appendix A. Study Methodology

Research for this study included four components:

 o A review of relevant literature.

 o Brief visits to several Indian police departments and the Indian Police
Academy in Artesia, New Mexico.

 o Intensive site visits to four reservations.

 o A two-part survey distributed to Indian police departments.

Each study component is described below.

Literature Review

Several areas of literature provided background and context for the
primary research. These included American Indian issues, policing,
sociology, and anthropology. For all areas, both historical and current
materials ranging from academic works to local newspaper articles were
found to be relevant.

American Indian topics included history, the history of policing on Indian
reservations, culture, economic development, governance, sovereignty,
and materials specific to the four tribes studied in depth. Policing topics
included the history of policing, community policing, rural policing, and
the organization and management of police departments. The sociology
review focused on rural sociology. The anthropology review focused
largely on Native American anthropology, but also included some
literature related to social control and the development of modern legal
systems in indigenous societies. The scope of the literature search is
reflected in the references at the end of this report.

Brief Visits to Several Police Departments

We made brief visits to several tribes and their police departments to
inform our selection of departments to be studied in depth. These brief
visits were also useful as a means of understanding possible survey issues.
Members of the research team visited 10 tribes across the Southwest, the
Northwest, the East, and the Northern Plains. The team also visited the
Indian Police Academy in Artesia, New Mexico, to understand the training
the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) provides to police officers.

Indepth Study of Four Police Departments

We studied four departments and the tribal contexts in which they operate
in depth to gain a richer understanding of the diverse and complex ways in
which Native communities cope with their policing challenges. Many
aspects of reservation policing were difficult to understand or even know
about without intensive onsite research. For example, we used this method
to clarify the details of organizational process and structure. Likewise,
because it allows investment in relationships, we expected the site-visit
approach to provide data on community members' more closely guarded
opinions (such as their honest perceptions of their police departments).
Data from the four indepth studies are integrated throughout this report
and are at the core of its discussion and analysis.

Like the brief site visits, intensive onsite research was an important
precursor to survey work. Because information about the practice of
policing in Indian Country is so limited, onsite work helped define the
topics on which broad-based survey data were needed. Similarly, the
substantial variation in justice administration, jurisdictional arrangements,
and socioeconomic conditions that exist in Indian Country suggests that
only some quantitative data comparisons are meaningful; intensive study
helped focus the survey on those that are.

Our site-selection strategy was to choose Indian nations that varied on as
many relevant dimensions as could be captured in such a small sample.[1]
The most important dimensions on which we sought significant variation
were crime problems and other policing challenges, culture, economics,
geography, and the management and administrative structure of the police
departments.[2]

We chose Tohono O'odham and the Gila River Indian Community (both in
Arizona) because they have similar cultural backgrounds but distinctly
different geographical and economic settings. Both are O'odham nations
located in their traditional homelands. We anticipated that, as
southwestern tribes near the Mexican border, they might share some
important regional challenges, including the problems of illegal
immigration and drug smuggling. Nonetheless, we expected the overall
problems to vary substantially between the tribes because the Gila River
Indian Community is greatly subject to the social and economic influence
of a major city (Phoenix) and Tohono O'odham remains more isolated,
more traditional, and more economically distressed.

Besides these contrasts, we were interested in comparing the policing
challenges and approaches of tribes in different regions. Early
investigation suggested that Indian nations in the Northern Plains have
been generally (although not universally) more assimilated than tribes in
the Southwest and that in some cases they suffer from more crime--
particularly more violent crime--a combination that, according to some
policing professionals, makes them much more difficult to police.[3]
Indeed, the way these factors combine with political dynamics and
influence the administration of some otherwise interesting police
departments caused us to rule out certain candidates for intensive study.
The sustained involvement in these departments necessary for the study
could not be assured. The sites selected for indepth study on the Northern
Plains were the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead
Reservation (in Montana) and the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort
Berthold Reservation (in North Dakota).

Finally, one of the most important differences between tribes is the
management structure of their police departments. While the possibilities
are covered in more detail in chapter 2, an important distinction among
many Indian communities is whether policing services are provided by the
BIA or by the tribe itself. If a tribe opts to manage the police department
itself, it can either self-fund or contract for funding from the BIA. In the
latter case, money that would have been used by the Federal Government
to provide policing services is passed on to the tribe.

Our sample of four sites includes important comparisons and contrasts
along this management and funding dimension. At the outset of our study,
the Gila River Indian Community had a BIA-managed department to
which it had added a number of tribally funded officers. By the end of the
study period, it had assumed management responsibility from the Federal
Government using a contract under Public Law 93-638, which is the most
common arrangement for replacing the Federal management of policing
services in Indian Country.[4] Tohono O'odham operated under a "638
contract" throughout the period. Similarly, the Confederated Salish and
Kootenai Tribes have operated for many years under a self-governance
compact (in practical terms, this means they have greater control over the
way the department is funded and structured than do tribes operating under
638 contracts). Finally, the Three Affiliated Tribes' police department is
BIA-administered (at the time of this research, the Tribes had no intention
of changing their arrangement). The contrast between the last two cases
may be especially important; some observers suggested that the
departments were among the best in Indian Country, although they work
under management structures that are ostensibly nearly as different as
possible.

We restricted our study to four sites for several reasons. First, we hoped to
study both the departments and the tribal contexts in which they serve.
Doing both well required a fairly small study sample. Second, in a few
cases, it took substantial time onsite (a few days to approximately 2 weeks
of staff time) to obtain approval to conduct the study. This time was
productive from a research standpoint--offering much insight into tribal
politics and culture during the process--but it was time consuming and
limited the number of communities we could approach for indepth
involvement. Finally, the increased time spent at each site allowed the
formation of relationships, which produced critical information and insight
into the way tribes policed. Clearly, it would be productive to study
additional sites, especially given the diversity of policing arrangements
and social, cultural, and economic settings in Indian Country.

Although we spent considerable unstructured time at each site, our
research was guided by a systematic list of individuals and groups we
wished to interview and activities we wished to observe. Interview
prospects included the following:

 o Formal and informal tribal political leaders from both the "national"
(central tribal government) and "subnational" (district or village) levels.

 o Representatives of the tribal criminal justice system, especially those
from the police department, correctional system, probation office,
judiciary, prosecutors' office, and the defense bar.

 o Health and social service providers working for both tribal and Federal
agencies.

 o Consumers of police and criminal justice services, particularly
individuals and families who had been through the criminal justice system,
youth groups, and residents of high-crime areas.

 o Representatives of important historical and cultural practices, such as
elders and traditional healers.

The activities we sought to observe included routine police activities,
especially through ride- and walkalongs with the police; the operation of
the broader criminal justice system (court proceedings, jail conditions,
etc.); and important community meetings, such as legislative sessions,
village or district meetings, school board meetings, elders' meetings, youth
council or club sessions, and (where possible and appropriate) cultural
activities.

Surveys

Although survey-based research addresses a narrower range of issues, the
payoff compared with indepth site research is the ability to collect data
from a larger sample of communities. Such data put information from the
smaller, intensive study sample into perspective; they should help both
researchers and tribes understand what is typical and what is not.

To maximize the response rate and stretch our resources, we worked with
Eileen Luna (Assistant Professor, American Indian Studies) at the
University of Arizona (Tucson) in the survey effort. The University of
Arizona mailed the first questionnaire (part I of the survey) to more than
200 departments in the continental United States, regardless of size. This
distribution was intended to be comprehensive, including all departments
whose primary responsibility is to police Indian Country.[5] Harvard
University mailed the second questionnaire (part II)--which was longer
and more indepth than the first and included some organizational
questions--to 67 large tribes (but only 66 departments, since two of the
large tribes share a BIA department). These nations are the Harvard
Project on American Indian Economic Development's usual study sample,
a group for which the Project possesses substantial background data. In
general, these larger nations set the practice standard for Indian Country in
terms of business activity, government and administrative function, and
political rights.[6] Because of their probable greater importance, our
greater familiarity with them, and our access to better data about them
overall, we made a concentrated effort to increase the response rate among
these tribes. All data that we report from both questionnaires of the survey
refer to this smaller study sample.

The questionnaires and list of respondents are included in appendix B.
Forty-six of 66 departments responded to part I of the survey (the
University of Arizona instrument) and 39 to part II (the Harvard
University instrument). Using background data from the Harvard Project
on American Indian Economic Development, we determined that, in
general, the groups of respondents and nonrespondents are comparable
along the following dimensions: average economic status, communities'
average distance from large urban areas, and police departments' usual
administrative arrangements (638 contract versus BIA policing). However,
police departments responding to the survey serve tribes that are somewhat
larger (in both population and area), less active users of their native
language, and less involved with the gaming industry than the
nonresponding tribes.

One caution is echoed throughout this report and in the work of other
criminal justice researchers and practitioners in Indian Country (for
example, Elias 1998; Luna 1998; Luna and Walker 1998; Wood 1998). All
but the most basic and easily verified data must be interpreted carefully;
this is most emphatically true for data collected by telephone or by mail.
For example, multiple inquiries often produced different answers to the
same questions regarding salaries, department budgets and size, and crime
statistics. The reasons are numerous and complex, but the result is that we
hold very loosely to what might be termed the "statistical" portrait of
police departments in Indian Country offered later in this report, and we
develop a portrait of the typical department that focuses more on
management challenges. Indeed, there is a growing consensus among
researchers and policymakers on management challenges faced by Indian
police departments, even while there is substantial disagreement on such
issues as the budget resources available and the ratio of law enforcement
officers to citizens.[7]

Notes

1. In some, but not all, cases our work was facilitated by existing working
relationships with tribes. However, having such a relationship was not a
criterion for selection.

2. PL 83-280 provides significant variation along several of these
dimensions. We excluded these different administrative and jurisdictional
arrangements from our study, however, because the impacts of the law--
and the reform options available to tribes whose policing institutions are
subject to it--are important enough to merit a study of their own.

3. For example, interview with Brent LaRocque, Criminal Investigator,
Bureau of Indian Affairs Division of Law Enforcement Services, March
1996.

4. The Gila River Indian Community assumed management of its police
department on August 10, 1998.

5. There are approximately 330 reservations in the lower 48 United States,
but many fewer Indian police departments. This is because some BIA-
administered departments serve more than one reservation (particularly
where tribal communities are small) and some tribes are not eligible to
have their own police departments.

6. Using the 1980 Census as a benchmark, the Harvard Project on
American Indian Economic Development sample includes tribes with
population 1,000 or greater that are located in traditional Indian areas of
the continental United States. However, the sample excludes Oklahoma-
based tribes, both because they lack distinct land bases (the only
reservation per se in Oklahoma belongs to the Osage) and because the U.S.
Bureau of the Census collects data for them in a way that is not
comparable to the way it collects data for other tribes.

7. This was discussed by members of the Indian policing panel at the
National Institute of Justice Research and Evaluation Conference,
Washington, D.C., August 1998.

------------------------------

About the National Institute of Justice

NIJ is the research and development agency of the U.S. Department of
Justice and is the only Federal agency solely dedicated to researching
crime control and justice issues. NIJ provides objective, independent,
nonpartisan, evidence-based knowledge and tools to meet the challenges
of crime and justice, particularly at the State and local levels. NIJ's
principal authorities are derived from the Omnibus Crime Control and
Safe Streets Act of 1968, as amended (42 U.S.C. sections 3721-3722).

NIJ's Mission

In partnership with others, NIJ's mission is to prevent and reduce crime,
improve law enforcement and the administration of justice, and promote
public safety. By applying the disciplines of the social and physical
sciences, NIJ--

 o Researches the nature and impact of crime and delinquency.

 o Develops applied technologies, standards, and tools for criminal justice
practitioners.

 o Evaluates existing programs and responses to crime.

 o Tests innovative concepts and program models in the field.

 o Assists policymakers, program partners, and justice agencies.

 o Disseminates knowledge to many audiences.

NIJ's Strategic Direction and Program Areas

NIJ is committed to five challenges as part of its strategic plan: 1)
rethinking justice and the processes that create just communities; 2)
understanding the nexus between social conditions and crime; 3) breaking
the cycle of crime by testing research-based interventions; 4) creating the
tools and technologies that meet the needs of practitioners; and 5)
expanding horizons through interdisciplinary and international
perspectives. In addressing these strategic challenges, the Institute is
involved in the following program areas: crime control and prevention,
drugs and crime, justice systems and offender behavior, violence and
victimization, communications and information technologies, critical
incident response, investigative and forensic sciences (including DNA),
less-than-lethal technologies, officer protection, education and training
technologies, testing and standards, technology assistance to law
enforcement and corrections agencies, field testing of promising programs,
and international crime control. NIJ communicates its findings through
conferences and print and electronic media.

NIJ's Structure

The NIJ Director is appointed by the President and confirmed by the
Senate. The NIJ Director establishes the Institute's objectives, guided by
the priorities of the Office of Justice Programs, the U.S. Department of
Justice, and the needs of the field. NIJ actively solicits the views of
criminal justice and other professionals and researchers to inform its
search for the knowledge and tools to guide policy and practice.

NIJ has three operating units. The Office of Research and Evaluation
manages social science research and evaluation and crime mapping
research. The Office of Science and Technology manages technology
research and development, standards development, and technology
assistance to State and local law enforcement and corrections agencies.
The Office of Development and Communications manages field tests of
model programs, international research, and knowledge dissemination
programs. NIJ is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which
also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and
the Office for Victims of Crime.

To find out more about the National Institute of Justice, please contact:

National Criminal Justice Reference Service
P.O. Box 6000
Rockville, MD 20849-6000
800-851-3420
e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org

To obtain an electronic version of this document, access the NIJ Web site
(http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij).

If you have questions, call or e-mail NCJRS.