CHAPTER 10 Crime Rates and Crime Reports Crime statistics for reservation communities are often difficult to find and often incomplete. Us...
CHAPTER 10 Crime Rates and Crime Reports Crime statistics for reservation communities are often difficult to find and often incomplete. Usually reservation crime statistics are collected either by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) police, tribal police, or by county sheriff offices. None of these agencies is well positioned to provide comprehensive statistical information about crime rates and related information. The BIA does not systematically collect data on reservation communities, and is not well equipped to collect and report the information. Reports about jail conditions and crimes are often generated by police or reservation agency staff, who usually have not conducted surveys or systematic data collection.
When data are reported to the FBI, they are reported in the aggregate, rather than by individual reservations. Tribal police departments are generally so underfunded and understaffed that data collection and reporting are not high priorities. County police often collect data within the county about arrests and crime reports, but most counties do not collect crime data on whether the incidents took place on reservations. FBI crime-report forms require considerable information about each report, but these requirements do not include the location of the incident within or outside Indian country. Increasingly, with new national crime-report databases under discussion and technological advances in computer access and database programming, we should expect more systematic and compete data collection in the future. Some county sheriff’s departments that were contacted through the study were not now able to provide data about crime reports on the reservations within their jurisdiction. Generally, the absence of reservation crime data from county police is due in part to databases and procedures that did not distinguish incidences of crime on reservation territories. Most county sheriff’s departments did not make distinctions between reservations and other parts of the county, despite the daily presence of Public Law 280 jurisdictional issues.
In some of these cases, sheriff’s departments told us that they did not have enough staff, programming capability, or operating procedures enabling collection or retrieval of crime data within reservation contexts. On the other hand, at least one sheriff responded to our research inquiry by reprogramming his county data-collection system to include an Indian country designation. He later informed us that his staff did not find this task time-consuming, costly, or burdensome.
Because of the difficulties at the federal, tribal, and county level, crime data for Indian reservations are often incompletely reported and, therefore, of relatively little value for systematic or comparative statistical analysis. Uniform procedures for crime-data collection in Indian country are necessary for gaining better understanding of reservation crime and crime rates. Both national uniform crime codes and data systems, as well as county and reservation police, need to work with functionally interactive database systems that share data and report mutually congruent crime statistics. The reports in the present study differ from crime statistics reports collected by police and BIA agency staff. Usually those statistics are counts of the frequency of crime reports and 277 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.
This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. related incidents. In this survey study, we ask respondents quantitative and qualitative questions about the frequencies of crimes, and also about their perceptions about the most serious crimes, police and community priorities about managing crimes, whether some crimes go unreported and why, whether there are informal ways of managing crime issues with tribal and/or federal-BIA and state/county officials, to whom tribal members report crimes, and whether respondents feel that reported crimes get prosecuted.
The respondents are reservation residents, law enforcement personnel, and criminal justice personnel. Most respondents work with crime-related issues and are generally well informed about crime, court, and policing issues on Indian reservations. Reservation-resident respondents are individuals who are employed on the reservation, an Indian person living on the reservation, or a tribal member. Most reservation residents are tribal members on the reservation in question, but non-Indian tribal employees and non-tribal member Indian employees and residents are also part of the reservation-resident sample. Reservation residents are chosen because they are community elders or leaders, or their work is engaged with police, court, social services, or related crime issues. Law enforcement personnel generally are police officers and related personnel who work for county or BIA police departments. Tribal police officers who work for and are funded by a tribal government are classified as reservation residents in the Public Law 280 jurisdictions, while police officers who work for the BIA or federal government, as well as tribal police in non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions, are classified as law enforcement personnel. Criminal justice personnel are judges, attorneys, public defenders, probation officers and other related personnel who work as county, federal, or, in the non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions, tribal employees, or who work in the courts, such as legal advocates, public defenders, and attorneys. Tribal judges and tribal court personnel who work for the tribal government in Public Law 280 jurisdictions are classified as reservation residents, and reservation court and legal personnel who work for the tribe, the BIA or the federal government in non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions are classified as criminal justice personnel. The key to the distinction between reservation residents and the categories of law enforcement and criminal justice personnel is who has responsibility for criminal jurisdiction. In the Public Law 280 jurisdictions, where tribal police and court personnel exist, they are treated as reservation residents because they are not generally exercising criminal jurisdiction. They may be enforcing state/county law under cross-deputization agreements or enforcing civil laws. However, where questions ask reservation residents in Public Law 280 jurisdictions to evaluate tribal police and courts, the respondents in those categories are excluded from the reservationresident sample. In the non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions, in contrast, there are crimes over which the tribe has exclusive jurisdiction, and therefore where tribal police and courts exist, they are generally exercising criminal jurisdiction.
Thus, in these jurisdictions the tribal police are treated as law enforcement personnel, and the tribal court and related staff are treated as criminal justice personnel. Our assumption in constructing the reservation-resident category is that reservation residents will have different work, community, and government experiences than law enforcement and criminal justice personnel, and they may express these views and orientations based on their understandings and experiences with police and courts. The groupings of 278 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. reservation residents, law enforcement personnel, and criminal justice personnel are not based on racial or tribal membership.
Many non-Indians work for tribal governments and they are classified as reservation residents, except where they are policing or administering justice in nonPublic Law 280 jurisdictions. Many tribal members work for county police departments, some are county judges, or work for BIA police departments or courts. The latter tribal members are classified as law enforcement or criminal justice personnel because their occupations are outside of tribal government management, and these tribal members are entrusted to carry out county, state, or federal laws and procedures, and not tribal government law and policing practices. We investigate whether each group with different locations within the administration of justice and policing in Indian country yields different viewpoints about court and police implementation.
This study is designed to make comparisons between the group responses between reservation residents, law enforcement personnel, and criminal justice personnel. One of our primary hypotheses investigates whether group differences among reservation residents, law enforcement, and criminal justice personnel yield significantly different orientations toward the administration of court and police services in Indian country. In the present chapter, we seek to investigate group differences in the perceptions of the most serious crimes, frequencies of crimes, police and community priorities about managing crimes, perceptions about crime reporting, and perceptions about the best ways to approach policing on reservations. Our null hypothesis is that each group approaches and perceives crimes in a similar manner, and there are no statistically significant differences between reservation residents, law enforcement, and criminal justice personnel. In the null hypothesis scenario, reservation residents, law enforcement, and criminal justice personnel agree about the frequency, priorities, and management of crime on Indian reservations.
The alternative hypothesis suggests that reservation residents, law enforcement personnel, and criminal justice personnel disagree about the frequency, police priorities, patterns of unreported crimes, rates of crime prosecution, and management of crime on reservations. In the latter scenario, we expect to see statistical differences among the collective responses of reservation residents, law enforcement personnel, and criminal justice personnel when they express their perceptions about the most serious crimes, police crime priorities, community crime priorities, patterns of unreported crimes, rates of crimes prosecution, and the best ways to manage crime issues on reservations. The primary hypothesis for the study suggests there are significant differences in the administration of justice and policing in Indian country between Public Law 280 and non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions. Policing and courts in Public Law 280 jurisdictions are primarily managed by states and counties, while non-Public Law 280 reservations generally are under tribal, federal, and/or BIA police and court administration.
Our hypotheses investigate respondent perceptions about patterns of difference between policing and court administration on Public Law 280 and non-Public Law 280 reservations. The null hypothesis suggests that there are no differences in respondent perceptions of police or court administration on Indian reservations in Public Law 280 and non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions, and, in this case, no statistically significant differences. If the null hypothesis is upheld, then respondents have similar perceptions of policing and court administration in both Public Law 280 and non-Public 279 This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department.
Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Law 280 jurisdictions. For purposes of investigating crime rates and crime reports in this chapter, the null hypothesis suggests respondents, in both Public Law 280 and non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions, agree about patterns of crime frequency, the most serious crimes, police crime priorities, community crime priorities, the patterns of unreported crimes, rates of crime prosecutions, and the best ways to manage crime issues. The alternative hypothesis suggests that respondents will report significant differences or disagreement among Public Law 280 and nonPublic Law 280 respondents about crimes frequencies, crime reporting, and the other crime issues.
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