WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has launched the most ambitious effort in decades to address the breakdown of justice on Indian reservations, starting with the failure of federal authorities to fully investigate and prosecute many serious crimes.
The Justice Department will deploy 35 new assistant U.S. attorneys and 45 additional FBI agents to reservations over the next two years. And funding for key programs that aid tribal courts and law enforcement will increase by nearly $180 million in fiscal year 2011 — a jump of 250 percent over the past two years and an amount one senior congressional aide called “groundbreaking.”
U.S. attorneys received a stinging memo in January, instructing them to develop annual plans for more effectively tackling reservation crime and noting they would be held accountable by higher-ups in Washington.
It was a rare public rebuke of the status quo — and a dramatic reversal from the Bush administration, which tribal leaders say all but abandoned Indian country as federal law enforcement officials struggled to deal with the threat of terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001.
“If one looks at the crime rates that you see in Indian country, if you see what a young girl born in Indian country and who lives her life there can expect in terms of sexual abuse and sexual violence, it is really — it’s breathtaking,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee last month, highlighting a crime that on some reservations has reached alarming levels.
The administration is also supporting a bill now moving through Congress that would begin to change the painfully complicated legal structure under which reservation crimes are investigated and prosecuted.
Under a law that dates to the mid-1800s, serious crime committed on most reservations is the sole responsibility of federal authorities — investigated by FBI agents and prosecuted by U.S. attorneys. But a complicated jurisdictional maze and divided agency responsibility mean that a single felony can be investigated by three different agencies.
And tribal leaders bitterly complain that over-worked federal prosecutors fail to pursue many serious crimes.
The Justice Department released statistics for the first time this week that show U.S. attorneys declined to prosecute 47 percent of all Indian country cases referred to them by investigators in fiscal 2009. About 12 percent of those cases were declined immediately and may have been related to problems of jurisdiction or a finding that no felony crime had been committed, according to Melissa Schwartz, a Justice Department spokeswoman.
The bill — known as the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2009 — would give tribes the power to impose longer sentences and prosecute more serious crime themselves. It would also require federal officials to annually disclose the number of Indian country cases they decline.
Skepticism lingers
“This is a really big deal,” said John Dossett, general counsel of the National Congress of American Indians, noting the initiative nonetheless faces some skepticism among tribal leaders who have seen similar efforts before.
“It’s as if your partner were an alcoholic and they tell you they’re going to quit and they quit for three days. You aren’t really going to believe them until enough time has gone by that you actually know they are living up to their commitments,” Dossett said.
“We’ve all got our work cut out for us to maintain the level of effort for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Though some tribes have benefited from casino gambling or increased mineral revenues over the last two decades, many of the country’s more than 300 reservations remain poor, ravaged by violence and rising crime.
A 2007 Denver Post series found that many investigations into serious crimes on the reservations were bungled or went went unprosecuted, including felony assaults, rapes and sexual abuse of children.
Native American women are three times as likely to be assaulted in their lives as their white counterparts. Some reservations experience violent crime rates that are 10 times the national average, according to federal data.
The new Justice Department initiatives are being shaped in part by hard lessons learned by the last major attempt to improve justice in Indian country, a Clinton administration effort that ran aground on shifting priorities and institutional neglect.
That 1998 effort targeted $182 million for beefed up reservation law enforcement, and included an annual grant of nearly $5 million to fund 30 new FBI agents. The FBI took the money, but transferred 18 of the agents to counterterrorism and other duties after Sept. 11.
This time, the new FBI agents are being funded through an annual grant from the Department of Interior, partly as a safeguard to keep the agency from using the money for something else, a congressional aide said.
“My moment came a decade ago when one tribe was explaining that they have a reservation the size of some northeastern states and yet have two police officers roaming it in the middle of night with virtually no effective communications equipment,” said Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, one of the architects of the Clinton initiative and now the No. 3 official at the Justice Department.
“To come back 10 years later and discover that is basically still true is something that sticks with you,” he said.
A second chance
Perrelli sees the new administration’s efforts as a second chance to get things right, and helped devise the strategy behind the January memo, which requires U.S. attorneys to devise “an operational plan” for improving Indian country prosecutions and to make fighting sexual violence on reservations a priority.
In the rarified world of federal law enforcement, it was a key institutional signal, experts say, and a marked change from the Bush administration. A top Bush-era official told Congress in 2006 that U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger, the then-head of the Attorney General’s Native American Issues Subcommittee, had been targeted for replacement because he devoted too much time to Indian country crime.
Brendon Johnson, the U.S. attorney for South Dakota and the current subcommittee head, said the new steps have left little room for doubt among prosecutors in the field.
“We have a meeting now and we have 20 to 25 U.S. attorneys attend,” Johnson said. “Now the Native American Issues Subcommittee is the largest subcommittee that the attorney general has.”
Michael Riley: 202-662-8907 or mriley@denverpost.com
