What Are the Problems with Cooperative Agreements? We asked respondents in PL 280 jurisdictions that had cooperative law enforcement agree...
What Are the Problems with Cooperative Agreements? We asked respondents in PL 280 jurisdictions that had cooperative law enforcement agreements: What are the problems with those agreements? There were 88 responses from reservation residents, and 15 from state/county law enforcement officers. Only 1 state/county criminal justice official gave a response to this question. Among the reservation residents, 22 (25%) said there were no problems, and 5 (6%) could not answer or were unsure. Of the remaining respondents, the largest group was 26 respondents (30%) who identified problems related to tribal sovereignty or lack of respect for the tribe. Among the concerns that these respondents expressed were too much control by the county, tribal police being forced to operate according to county policies, a preference for tribal rather than county police,
and fear that the agreement (especially police services agreements) would discourage the tribe from creating its own tribal police force. Another 9 respondents (10%) indicated that the chief problem resulting from the agreement was confusion and lack of clarity about jurisdiction and responsibilities. A related response was provided by another 9 respondents (10%), who identified problems associated with the meshing of county and tribal systems. These respondents mentioned such things as misunderstandings, inconsistent administration and political swings, passing the buck between departments, and lack of communication. Nine respondents (10%) focused on resource problems, including inadequate funds, an insufficient number of tribal police, and the county failing to allocate adequate resources to the reservation and over-relying on the tribe. Three respondents from tribes with police services agreements (3%) viewed the chief problem as inadequate, or poor-quality, services from the county; and another 3 respondents (3%) saw the problem as too many police on the reservation. Thus, three-quarters of the reservation residents identified 399 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. problems with their tribe’s cooperative law enforcement agreement, with the largest set of concerns relating to sovereignty and respect for the tribe. Illustrative comments from reservation residents are the following: I don’t think that the county trusts that we can hold our officers to the same standards as theirs are. ...
[I]f you have a personality conflict or someone running against the sheriff in an election, that deputy card gets pulled. That job’s gone. So, they control more with each and every one of those officers. So, how much cooperation is there, other than the money? These cooperative agreements are developed in such a manner that they all state that the local sheriff, more or less, has the say-so over tribal police departments and all crimes, so whatever he says is what we have got to abide by. Which I have a problem with …. They expect us to follow the state policies and procedures, but yet, you know, we have got to be told what to do, you know? ... And to me it’s morally wrong and it’s really hard for me as an enrolled member. To me, I clearly see racial overtones to it, and I think we need to get over that
…. What happens is … the tribal government usually changes every four years, new people come in. And with the sheriff’s office also, and the county commissioners. And we lost communication ... and things just started slipping through the cracks, and the communication got worse. ... (The sheriff’s department was complaining about) incident-complaint reports not being shared …. Just like, we had a different incident-complaint report form than they had. We realized we need to have the same one — same kind, exact same one …. We didn’t have one of the statewide computers where you can look up vehicle registration. They wanted our vehicle registration. Lots of problems that could have been worked out. There’s always funding issues, and the government’s only got so much money to go around. [S]o, (the police services agreement) may take away the initiative to develop a purely tribal police force and a tribal criminal justice system. It would delay the development of that. Well, financial, we end up providing some of the services that the county normally does, like traffic citations, we could do that, but, 400 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. then again, the fines go to the court or the county courts, they don’t come here even though the infraction happened here and we do the work, we do the processing and all that. We don’t get compensated for that. The problem that I see is, we get no services. We pay for services that we are not provided. And besides that, we shouldn’t have to pay them anything. I don’t think we should have to pay them to provide a service that they provide to everybody else around us. There are some people that say that it’s a sell-out. And to a certain extent, I guess you have to agree with them. Because it’s a concession.
I don’t want it to kind of breed complacency with the tribe. You know, if they get used to the county kind of covering it, then maybe they won’t think as strongly about retroceding, or looking to retrocede, or pushing retrocession and strengthening their own police officers. ... I would like to see every tribe … eventually get the state out of their business as much as possible. I don’t see a problem. I think it works very well between the tribal government and the state. And without any kind of agreement, then you’re always going to have a jurisdictional battle. Our [tribal police] deputies, once again, are in a situation that they have two taskmasters: [tribal police], as well as the sheriff’s department. … But at no time have we ever pulled the officer in two opposite directions. We always try and keep the goal in mind, and strive for that goal. Of the state/county law enforcement respondents, 7 (47%) found no problems with the cooperative agreements, and 1 was not sure. In other words, nearly half of the law enforcement respondents were fully satisfied with the agreements, compared with only one-quarter of the reservation residents. Of the remaining law enforcement respondents, 4 (27%) viewed the major problem as the meshing of the two systems, including concerns about officer differences and an inability to rely on the tribe. One respondent (6%) identified inadequate resources as the main problem, another (6%) focused on lack of clarity about jurisdiction, and still another (6%) stressed the problem of non-Indian resistance to the empowerment of tribal police.
Overall, a much higher percentage of law enforcement officers than reservation residents (47% vs. 25%) found the agreements to be problem-free. 401 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. Illustrative comments from state/county law enforcement personnel are the following: There are bugs that come up, just operational things. One of them that came up about five or six months ago was they had their cops out there, were going outside of the boundaries of the reservation and writing speeding tickets and stuff. ... The problem with that is they’re not indemnified by the tribe.
So, they’re kind of sitting out in never-never land out there. So, they had to get reined in there a little bit. I think when you’re in the field, people don’t understand what the difference between civil and criminal is. So, when they start arguing with you, “Well you can’t do that,” or the state officer can’t do that. “Why is he on our rez?” The sheriff’s department by Public Law 280 is mandated to provide services to the reservation, so we can’t say we’re not going to go handle a crime on the reservation. The (tribal) police department is not required under Public Law 280 to provide any services to the reservation. They can say, well, we’re not staffing anybody today, or we’re gonna go ahead and let everybody have a vacation day today. Or we’re gonna send our entire department to Nevada for training. And they don’t have any requirement to maintain staffing. So, that is the only frustration that I’ve ever had with tribal police department is I am required to have staffing, and I always, as a supervisory, am constantly battling the manpower needs of the reservation and vacation requests …. It’s been pretty open with all of the tribes that, when we do find a problem, we’re at least able to say, ”This isn’t working right. What else do we need to do here?” So, I don’t know if there’s anything currently, but certainly if something comes up, we’re going to work with it to try and correct it.
I don’t think you’re going to find too many (problems) on our side of the agreement. From their point of view, I could see that there’s a lack of sovereignty, there’s a lack of control and independence, and we’re unique that our sheriff … is so cooperative, I would say, and that the people we have up there are so well suited to the job, that if you had another agency with a less cooperative chief executive and less cooperative staff, you would be having a lot of cultural friction out there that wouldn’t make this work. So, if you had that, I guess 402 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. what I’m saying is that it’s not just PL 280, it’s the fact that we get together so well and have PL 280. If we had PL 280 and we didn’t get along, this cooperative agreement wouldn’t work.52 The one criminal justice official who responded to this question identified a few problems with the cooperative agreement with the local tribe, including the possibility that the sheriff’s deputies were not following through with the required cultural training, and the fact that the absence of a full waiver of sovereign immunity by the tribe was putting the county at risk.
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