The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service manage more than 670 million acres of federal lands across the country (see fig. 1). Each agency has a unique mission, focused on priorities that shape how it manages these lands. Specifically: The Forest Service manages land for multiple uses, including timber, recreation, and watershed management and to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. The Forest Service manages lands under its jurisdiction through nine regional offices and 155 national forests and 20 grasslands. The Bureau of Land Management also manages land for multiple uses, including recreation; range; timber; minerals; watershed; wildlife and fish; natural scenic, scientific, and historical values; and the sustained yield of renewable resources. The agency manages public lands under its jurisdiction through 12 state offices; each state office has several subsidiary district and field offices. The Fish and Wildlife Service manages the National Wildlife Refuge System, a network of lands and waters that provides for the conservation of fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats, as well as opportunities for wildlife-dependent recreation, including hunting, fishing, and wildlife observation. The refuge system includes about 585 refuges. Individual refuges known as stand-alone refuges report directly to one of eight regional offices, or refuges may be grouped with others into a complex under a common manager, who in turn reports to a regional office. The National Park Service manages the 393 units of the National Park System to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife of the system so that they will remain unimpaired for the enjoyment of this and future generations. Individual park units have varied designations corresponding to the natural or cultural features they are to conserve, including national parks, monuments, lakeshores, seashores, recreation areas, preserves, and historic sites. The agency has established seven regional offices. To respond to and investigate illegal activities occurring on the lands they manage, the agencies employ uniformed law enforcement officers who patrol federal lands, respond to illegal activities, and conduct routine investigations. In addition, the agencies have investigative special agents who investigate serious crimes in more detail. In this report we use the term “law enforcement officer” to include both uniformed law enforcement officers and investigative special agents, unless noted otherwise. In each of the four agencies, different officials make decisions about law enforcement resource needs. The Forest Service’s law enforcement and investigations program is “straightlined,” meaning that law enforcement officers in the field report to law enforcement officials at a regional office, who in turn report to law enforcement officials at agency headquarters in Washington, D.C. The Forest Service has a budget line item for law enforcement, and within budget constraints, its Director of Law Enforcement and Investigations has authority to make decisions about the number of uniformed officers and investigative agents to employ and where to assign them. In contrast, for the three Interior agencies, law enforcement officials and unit or regional land managers share decision- making authority for the law enforcement programs: in general, law enforcement officials make decisions about the number and location of agents, while land managers—such as a Bureau of Land Management state director, a refuge manager, or a park superintendent—make decisions about uniformed officers for their specific land units. Land managers determine how much of their overall budget they want to allocate to law enforcement activities. This budget must cover each unit’s expenditures for law enforcement, maintenance, visitor services, resource management, and other operations. State and local law enforcement agencies, as well as other federal agencies, may also play a role in responding to illegal activities occurring on lands managed by the four land management agencies. For example, on some federal lands, state and local law enforcement officers have sole responsibility for responding to certain crimes, such as violent crimes, and on other federal lands, the responsibility for responding to most crimes is shared among federal, state, and local law enforcement officers. In some locations, state and local law enforcement agencies have entered into agreements allowing federal land management agencies’ law enforcement officers to act as state and local law enforcement officers on federal lands. Specifically, such agreements may allow the land management agencies’ law enforcement officers to enforce state laws, such as traffic laws. Other agreements may allow local law enforcement officers to enforce certain federal laws and regulations, such as fishing and hunting restrictions, on federal lands. And other federal agencies also enforce laws and respond to illegal activities on federal lands. For example, Border Patrol—an office within the Department of Homeland Security—is responsible for controlling and guarding the borders of the United States against the illegal entry and smuggling of people, drugs, or other contraband, and the Drug Enforcement Administration in the Department of Justice enforces federal laws regarding controlled substances. As in America’s cities, suburbs, and rural areas, a wide variety of illegal activities occurs on federal lands around the nation, damaging natural and cultural resources and threatening the safety of the public and agency employees. But it is unknown how often these illegal activities occur because agency data do not fully capture the occurrence and magnitude of such activities; similarly, the extent of resource damage and threats to public and agency employee safety is also unknown. Although agency data are insufficient to quantify the extent of illegal activities or their effects, the data identify a variety of illegal activities occurring on federal lands, ranging from traffic violations to theft of natural and cultural resources to violent crimes. These activities may have overlapping effects on natural, cultural, and historical resources; public access and safety; and the safety of agency employees. Available information does not allow land management agencies to fully identify either the occurrence of illegal activities on federal lands or the effects of those activities on resources, the public, and agency employees. The agencies maintain data on law enforcement incidents, including information such as the type of crime, characteristics of victims and offenders, and types and value of resources or property damaged or stolen. These data, however, cannot be used to monitor trends in the occurrence of illegal activities on federal lands. Agency law enforcement officials told us that an inherent limitation in using these data to assess trends is that a change from one time period to another more likely reflects a change in law enforcement staffing levels or an agency’s emphasis on responding to particular types of crime than an actual change in the occurrence of crimes committed. For example, Bureau of Land Management officials told us that the lands they manage in southwestern Colorado are infrequently patrolled by law enforcement personnel and that if the agency increased the number of officers patrolling the area, the number of reported incidents would be likely to increase as well. According to these officials, the increase would most likely be due not to an actual rise in crime but simply to a rise in reported incidents because of the increased law enforcement presence. Moreover, for some illegal activities, such as violent crimes, state and local law enforcement agencies may have primary responsibility for responding even if the illegal activity occurs on federal lands, and the land management agencies may have no record that a crime occurred. Compounding these inherent shortcomings in incident data, two agencies—the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service—do not consistently collect or systematically maintain such data. Specifically, law enforcement officials said, of the National Park Service’s 393 units, about 100 units have adopted standardized incident-reporting systems, while the rest rely on ad hoc systems that the units have developed themselves. Similarly, although the Fish and Wildlife Service has developed an incident management system, according to the official responsible for managing law enforcement data, the agency does not require refuges to use it, and many refuges continue to use either a legacy data system or paper records to maintain incident data. As a result, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service officials said, it is difficult for them to track regional or national trends in illegal activities. To help remedy these shortcomings in incident data, Interior, in conjunction with its component agencies, is developing a new law enforcement data system, in part to respond to a 2002 report from its Office of Inspector General, which recommended that Interior develop a departmentwide law enforcement data system. The system, known as the Incident Management Analysis and Reporting System, is being designed to improve the agencies’ ability to analyze incident data to identify trends in occurrence of illegal activities—for example, by ensuring that senior agency officials have access to similar information for all units across the country and by allowing officials to analyze incidents across agency boundaries. In addition, the system will be compatible with geographic information systems, giving law enforcement officials the ability to analyze geographic trends in illegal activities. When complete, the system has the potential to provide better information on the types of illegal activities occurring at different Interior units across the country. According to Interior’s program manager, the agencies began field-testing the new system in November 2010 and expect to deploy it fully by the end of 2012. Like the extent of illegal activities occurring on federal lands, the effects of such illegal activities on resources, the public, and agency employees are also not fully known. Agency law enforcement officials reported that their agencies do not systematically collect information on the effects of illegal activities, except in certain cases—for example, when needed as evidence in criminal investigations. At units we visited, for example, officials said they had documented damage to specific locations resulting from illegal activities, such as dumping of trash and hazardous materials, marijuana cultivation, timber theft, and unauthorized off-highway vehicle (OHV) use. Senior agency law enforcement officials said that while available information—such as quantities of trash dumped or acres of vegetation damaged to cultivate marijuana—helps them understand the effects of illegal activities on resources at specific locations, they did not believe it is feasible to quantify the effects of all illegal activities across the country.