They started by firing the entire tribal-run police force - such as it was. In truth, the tribe's slipshod police had long ago ceased to be much of a deterrent. Serious crimes routinely went uninvestigated. In one notorious incident, a prisoner released from jail unsupervised to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting instead went to the house of a former girlfriend, where he beat and raped her.

Promising to hire more officers, modernize the jail and enforce the rule of law, the takeover of police powers by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs was cheered by many residents on this 1-million-acre reservation.

Fast forward four years and many of those residents say the situation has, if anything, gotten worse: Under federal control, a promised force of 32 uniformed officers has fallen to just 12. The jail is still a mess. Nearly 200 criminal charges were dismissed from tribal court last year because federal police never finished an arrest report.

For anyone looking for a comprehensive solution to the public-safety crisis plaguing the country's Indian reservations, the episode is telling.

To those who complain that federal authorities do a poor job and that tribes should run their own full- fledged justice systems like cities or states, skeptics can point to examples of incompetent tribal police forces or meddling by tribal leaders in the affairs of their courts and cops.

To those who argue that only the feds have the resources and expertise to solve the enormous public- safety crisis in Indian Country, there is a long history of underfunding, lack of attention and the federal government's own stunning failures.

So those are the horns of the dilemma: There is little doubt that the current system, which severely limits the law-enforcement powers of American Indians on their own land and makes the federal government solely responsible for prosecuting felony crime on reservations, is badly flawed. Tribes have been complaining about it for years. And many in the federal government, including key Washington lawmakers, agree it doesn't work.

"I think what's going on is appalling. ... The option of doing nothing is not an option. We have to solve this problem," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat and chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

Two popular paths considered
But finding a way to do that is another matter.
Most agree it means one of two paths. Either pour in significant new federal resources to better fight reservation crime or rewrite federal Indian law to give tribes more authority to do the job themselves - allowing them to prosecute felony crime, for one; giving them jurisdiction over non-Indians, for another.

The first would mean diverting Justice Department resources from high-priority efforts such as anti-terrorism to vast and isolated Indian reservations with stunning crime problems but few voters. The second would be costly, legally complex and politically dicey.

For as bad as the status quo is, any comprehensive solution that enhances the legal authority of tribes holds risks for leaders on both sides.

Lawmakers from Western states face strong pressures from white communities that border reservations not to cede jurisdiction over their residents even on tribal land. And tribal governments' own spotty record in exercising the limited authority they have gives plenty of others pause.

In one case in New Mexico three years ago, the tribal chairwoman of the Jicarilla (hick-a-ree-ya) Apache asked for federal help to investigate corruption in the tribe's police force - including accusations of sexual assault against female prisoners - and was summarily fired by her own tribal council. In another in Washington state, the governing council of the Spokane tribe responded to claims by a federal investigator that he had uncovered a web of tribal police corruption by demanding he be transferred. The agent's bosses in Washington complied.

For their part, many tribal officials aren't eager to trade the political points easily made decrying lousy federal law enforcement for the massive task of fixing the crime problem on reservations themselves.

"It's beautiful to have someone else to blame, but tribes don't necessarily want to take it on themselves," said Kevin Washburn, a Minnesota law professor and a member of the Oklahoma Chickasaw, who advocates giving tribes more criminal jurisdiction.

"I've thought that here I am, saying what I think is all these important things about Indian Country criminal justice, and people are going to rally behind everything I say. And that hasn't necessarily happened."

As those forces have slowed reform, the result has been a peculiar Washington ritual: At least once a decade for the past 30 years, a blue-ribbon commission or congressional hearings cite the breakdown of public safety on reservations, without being able to muster the political momentum necessary to solve it.

There has been some progress. Since a Clinton administration task force cited a "public safety crisis in Indian Country" in 1997, Congress has steadily increased funding for Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement programs through the Department of the Interior, more than doubling it to $201 million over 10 years. That money pays for patrol officers and tribal police investigators on most reservations.

But staffs were so low to begin with that a 2006 BIA analysis found that the number of police officers protecting reservations is still 42 percent below the minimum necessary.

New lines of authority proposed
Now, advocates for comprehensive reform believe there is a new window of opportunity. An Amnesty International report earlier this year blamed the jurisdictional maze for high rates of domestic violence and rape suffered by American Indian women. Spurred by the report, lawmakers on the Senate Indian Affairs Committee are preparing a bipartisan reform bill they hope will finally rein in the public-safety crisis roiling Indian lands.

If passed, it would reshape lines of authority on reservations for the first time in decades, giving Indians some law enforcement authority over non-Indians accused of sexual or domestic crimes on tribal lands - a major complaint of some tribes today.

"To the extent that the federal government is willing to return jurisdiction over non-Indians to Indian tribes right now, it may be because they know they're doing a bad job and are tired of getting yelled at," said Virginia Davis of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), a lobbying group for the tribes in Washington.

Some longtime observers are skeptical.
Ted Quasula, former Bureau of Indian Affairs law enforcement chief, was part of the previous reform effort during the Clinton administration. He remembers sitting in the same hearings a decade ago, dissecting the same problems.

The result was an administration proposal to double Justice Department funding for reservation law enforcement programs - the biggest increase in history and one that would have hired 500 more tribal police officers, 30 more FBI agents and 33 new federal prosecutors who focus solely on reservation crime.

Congress funded just 60 percent of the request in the first year. Some of the prosecutors ended up being used for other priorities, insiders say, and the number of dedicated Indian Country FBI agents has increased by just 12. Despite millions of dollars spent to build new tribal prisons, the unmet need is still $400 million, a recent analysis found.

And this year, none of four major Justice Department grant programs directed at reservations - money for prisons, police, tribal courts and youth crime prevention - are funded in President Bush's 2008 budget request. (Though Congress has restored a portion of the the programs' combined total budget of $42 million, that appropriations bill faces a veto threat.)

"For a lot of (lawmakers), it's out of sight, out of mind - it's-not-my-problem sort of thing," said Sen. John Thune, the South Dakota Republican who recently offered an amendment to provide $20 million to U.S. attorneys to boost reservation prosecutions. The amendment failed in a vote.

"I'm not saying people just tune it out. There just isn't a groundswell out there," he said.
Still, Thune believes that the problems are desperate and getting worse.
The rich profits from casino gambling that have poured in for some tribes over the past 10 years have created a Native American renaissance of sorts, but there are other forces - just as powerful - pulling the other way.

Meth - a scourge in much of the rural West - has hit reservations especially hard, feeding a wave of crime and violence that's shaken some tribes to the bone. American Indian gangs are also on the rise.

Statistics from the Indian Health Service in 2003, the latest available, show that the chances of an Indian living on a reservation being murdered is more than double that of the average American. An adult male on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota can expect to live to just 57 years old - 17 years less than the national average.

So distant from the political calculations of Washington, tribal and federal law enforcement officials are taking things into their own hands: Small, sometimes desperate steps, those involved point out, but better than nothing.

Members of the Lummi tribe in Washington state recently burned the house of drug dealer to the ground, a ritual act of communal justice.

Many others - the San Juan Pueblo in New Mexico, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa in North Dakota and the Eastern Cherokee in North Carolina among them - have aggressively revived the practice of banishment - forbidding tribal members or non-Indians who have broken certain laws from entering the reservation. It's a civil process not limited by the restrictions on tribal criminal courts.

Different view in Colorado
Ultimately, Colorado's top federal law-enforcement officer says, the only real solution is something much more sweeping. Troy Eid, Colorado's U.S. attorney, has turned into one of the Justice Department's most vocal advocates for jettisoning much of its current role on reservations.

It's more simple than it sounds, he says. Eid has called for transferring to American Indian tribes wholesale authority for prosecuting felony crime over all suspects, Indian and non-Indian alike.

The system he envisions would be optional. Those tribes that wanted the responsibility would opt in. And in exchange, the tribes would have to upgrade their legal codes and judicial systems, agreeing to meet strict benchmarks designed to guarantee individual rights.

"I look at this issue something like the reunification of Germany," Eid said. "They used to say it was absolutely impossible for East Germany to come back into the West without massive dislocation and unthinkable cost. But you know, it's been done."

The scale of the job implied by the metaphor may be closer to the mark than Eid intends: Many tribal judges and prosecutors now at work don't have law degrees. Tribal legal codes are often out of date or incomplete. Suspects on most reservations have a right to a defense attorney only if they can pay for one.

Federal prosecutors quietly concede that weak cases that should fall under their jurisdiction are routinely sent instead through tribal court, where guilty verdicts are easier to obtain.

"The tribal council appoints the judges and the courts, and they don't have to have experience in legal matters. And as appointees, there is political sway there. Those are all problems," said Thune, who as a South Dakota senator represents not only some of the country's largest reservations but also many adjacent communities worried about the vagaries of tribal justice.

And then there is the question of who would pay for it.
Davis, the NCAI lobbyist, said that as much as tribes want the kind of law enforcement powers that cities and states have, running those systems is incredibly expensive. Police forces and courts would have to be overhauled. And hundreds of millions of dollars in new prisons would have to be built.

The tribes that need it the most don't have the money. Many that do believe that paying the cost is part of the trust responsibility the federal government assumed when it took Indian lands.

"Of course they're not going to pay for it," said Philip S. Deloria, director of the American Indian Law Center in Albuquerque and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux. "It may be a mandate that the Indians have been begging for, but no matter. There's your headline. 'Inconsistency discovered in Indian position,' a brand- new thing in politics."

More important, Deloria said, even with significant federal help there are only a handful of tribes that could ever muster the resources and expertise to handle felony crime. While it's a great applause line, he says, significantly expanding American Indian law enforcement authority would most likely leave the problem on most reservations untouched.

"What most people overlook is that 70 percent of tribes are 1,000 people or fewer. We're not talking about the Navajo police system, where they can afford undercover officers," he said. "We're talking about Andy and Barney. You give Andy and Barney felony jurisdiction over everyone in Mayberry, and what are they going to do?"

Small steps in Senate bill
The Indian Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate is currently drawing up a bill that takes a different approach: Combining limited expansion in tribal jurisdiction with an effort to push the feds to be more effective at pursing Indian Country crime.

Politically more viable - in part because it is less sweeping - that approach largely has the support of the NCAI, the tribes' primary lobbying group in Washington.

But even supporters concede that it represents a series of small steps in the face of what is admittedly a problem of staggering dimensions.

Jurisdictionally, a pilot program would expand the power of tribes to include misdemeanor criminal authority over non-Indians who commit domestic or sexual violence on reservation lands, an early summary of the bill indicates.

Tribes would gain no jurisdiction over felony crime. And a non-Indian convicted of rape could serve at most a year in tribal jails. But supporters say it would give tribes a powerful tool to address at least one chronic problem: domestic violence committed by non-Indians who live on reservations.

On the federal side, the bill would create a series of benchmarks against which the performance of federal investigators and prosecutors responsible for the most serious reservation crime could be judged. And tribal prosecutors could be appointed as special assistant U.S. attorneys, allowing them to bring reservation cases in federal court.

"This is a really complicated system and there are a whole lot of different approaches you could take to fixing it, and our hope is that if you do enough of those at the same time, it will make a meaningful difference," the NCAI's Davis said.

But even the political prospects of that effort are uncertain. Any expansion of tribal authority over non-Indians is likely to be a tough sell in the Senate, and an early, more expansive jurisdictional proposal has been whittled to a pilot program.

"The only chance I've got to pass legislation is if I can put legislation together that has pretty broad support," said Dorgan, who expects a bill to be ready by February.

And while the bill could reauthorize and even increase the budgets for dozens of programs meant to bolster reservation law enforcement, that's no guarantee the money will ever leave federal coffers. Longtime observers point out that many of the best efforts in the past were authorized but never fully funded, habitual losers in Congress' Byzantine appropriations process.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Colorado's former senator, views those failures with the cynical eye of a lawmaker who, on this issue at least, was often on the losing side.

As the former head of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, Campbell said he spent endless hours talking and negotiating with his fellow senators over the problem of public safety on tribal lands. He tried for years to strengthen the authority of tribal courts, always without luck.

"I tried over and over," Campbell said. "But it goes back to old prejudices. 'I don't trust those Indians. I'm not going to let them try me.'

"There is still a lot of latent prejudice out there just under the surface," he said. "I think it prevents any meaningful change."

Always "a niche issue"
Doris Meissner, who was part of a Ford administration effort to examine the Justice Department's enforcement role on reservations long before she gained prominence as Bill Clinton's immigration chief, insists you don't need racism to explain the failures. You only need the tried-and-true math of power politics.

After months spent touring reservations, listening to the complaints of tribal authorities and crime victims, that effort in the 1970s ended with only minimal tinkering, none of it focused on the problem of criminal enforcement. The only significant change was a new section in the Justice Department to represent tribes' interest in civil litigation.

"We talked to a lot of people about the criminal side," Meissner said, "and we discussed it in our report in exactly the same way people are talking now: There are insufficient resources available from the community itself; the FBI has lots of other demands on its time; it's not a priority for the U.S. attorneys."

But "we are a system where those voices that can be backed up by votes at the ballot box are going to be the ones that prevail, and that's never been the case with Native Americans."

"It's a little along the lines of trying to get the vote for (Washington) D.C.," she said. "No matter how compelling it is, it always ends up being a niche issue."

Michael Riley: 303-954-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com