The federal Department of the Interior has approved a plan to conduct specialized training at Camp Grafton in North Dakota for Bureau of Indian Affairs law officers, U.S. Sen. John Hoeven announced Thursday.
One tribal chairman in the state says it's a good step but that many more are needed to address staffing and policing problems on reservations.
The training at the North Dakota National Guard facility at Devils Lake will be funded with $2.5 million, according to Hoeven, R-N.D., chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The money was included in fiscal year 2020 appropriations legislation that Congress passed in December, according to Hoeven's office.
Hoeven in March 2019 hosted a field hearing of the committee at United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, where he, Gov. Doug Burgum and tribal leaders urged BIA officials to provide more law enforcement resources and advocated for a local BIA training facility to better recruit officers.
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The central training facility for BIA law enforcement is in New Mexico, and the Great Plains region accounts for nearly two-thirds of all BIA law enforcement vacancies, according to Hoeven.
Much of the testimony during last year's hearing highlighted a lack of law enforcement officers to combat increases in drug trafficking on reservations, higher rates of violent crime, and cases of missing and murdered Indigenous people. Myra Pearson, who was chairwoman of the Spirit Lake Nation at the time, said the BIA has historically been underfunded in equipment, training and staffing.
Hoeven in a statement Thursday said the Camp Grafton training "will help provide important skills to BIA law enforcement officers so they are better able to serve our tribal communities, and represents an important commitment from BIA in advancing our goal of establishing a full-fledged training facility at Camp Grafton.”
Burgum in a statement called Camp Grafton "one of the region’s premier training centers" and said the BIA courses "will produce a talented and robust pool of much-needed BIA and tribal police officers trained at the highest level closer to their homes, friends, family and culturally important ties.”
Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation Chairman Mark Fox told the Tribune that he hopes the BIA training will help address problems with staffing and policing on reservations.
"It gets to the point where you begin to wonder what can help," he said. "I think you try anything and everything, and it always boils down to funding but also training, recruitment and then retaining."
Low pay for officers is a roadblock to recruitment, according to Fox.
"When you’re paying somebody $17, $18, $19 an hour to risk their lives where crime is exponential, where their exposure to everything from the pandemic to everything else that’s going on ... and the violence that is greater on reservations, you know that’s not much more than serving, delivering pizzas in Minot," he said.
The tribe's Fort Berthold Reservation has had a recent high-profile missing person case. Olivia Lone Bear went missing in October 2017 from New Town, prompting searches both on and off the reservation. Her body was found in July 2018 in a submerged truck pulled from Sanish Bay on Lake Sakakawea. Circumstances and the cause of her death aren't known. Fox said the case highlights the need for better law enforcement equipment and technology, such as surveillance systems.
"If we had had that surveillance system in place, we could have placed it strategically in such a way to say, 'well we know that truck didn’t go off the reservation,' and we would have confined our searches to that," he said.
The Camp Grafton training is expected to commence in the fall, with advanced courses on such issues as drug investigations, missing and murdered Indigenous people, and the Bridge Program, which enables officers with local or state training to become federally certified, according to Hoeven. The Department of Interior did not immediately respond to a request for additional details on the scope of the training and how it will be handled.