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
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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.