A study of this scope and complexity could not have been completed without the
contributions of many dedicated individuals. We are especially grateful to Winnie Reed, our
Program Officer at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), who has believed in this project
throughout and never discouraged us as we expanded it beyond the original plans.
Heather Valdez Singleton, our Project Director, was the engine that enabled the project to
move forward. NIJ support for the research derived from a strategic planning session that NIJ
held in 1998 to determine the most important directions for research on crime in Indian country.
Heather Valdez Singleton and Carole Goldberg produced a paper for that session, which NIJ later
published as “Public Law 280 and Law Enforcement in Indian Country
— Research Priorities,”
December 2005. After UCLA was awarded the project and Heather became its Director, she
made certain that all administrative and ethical requirements were met, arranged all the
permissions and logistics for research trips, collected data and relevant published sources, and
conducted many of the individual interviews with reservation residents, as well as with law
enforcement and criminal justice personnel. When she left the Project Director position to
continue her studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, she wrote up
results of our research on retrocession for her thesis; some of that work is incorporated into
Chapter 13 of this Report.
Other researchers and students made significant contributions to the study.
Linda
Deacon, an independent statistician, performed the statistical analysis of our quantitative data.
We enlisted Prof. Donald Green, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Jerry Gardner,
Executive Director of the Tribal Law & Policy Institute, to conduct some of the interviews, as
well as former students Michele Fahley, Cynthia Morales, Elton Naswood, Sal Perez, Mark
Vezzola, and Lambert Yazzie. Former student Jay Shapiro provided invaluable research
assistance for several of the chapters. And we also wish to thank the Justice Research and
Statistics Association for providing us with extremely helpful statistical data, as well as the
UCLAAmerican Indian Studies Center for providing books as gifts to our interviewees.
Finally, in addition to the financial support we received from NIJ, we also benefited from
summer research support granted by our respective deans. Duane Champagne wants to express
his gratitude to former UCLA Dean of Social Sciences Scott Waugh, and Carole Goldberg wants
to express hers to former UCLA School of Law Dean Jonathan Varat and current Dean Michael
Schill.
vii
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.
viii
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Congress enacted Public Law 280 (PL 280) in 1953,
eliminating most federal-Bureau of
Indian Affairs (BIA) Indian country criminal jurisdiction in five (later six) states and mandating
state criminal jurisdiction in Indian country in those same states. Public Law 280 also allowed
all other states to assume criminal jurisdiction in Indian country. Between 1953 and 1968, Public
Law 280 operated to transfer criminal jurisdiction without tribal consent.
Amendments to Public
Law 280 in 1968 made future state criminal jurisdiction subject to Indian consent and authorized
states to return, or retrocede, their jurisdiction back to the federal government.
Although Public Law 280, as well as similar laws applicable to individual tribes and
states, have drastically altered the criminal justice system for 23% of the reservation-based
Indian population and more than 70% of all federally recognized tribes, the law has never before
been the subject of systematic research. The purpose of this study has been to achieve a more
systematic and comprehensive understanding of Public Law 280, especially the availability and
effectiveness of state/county law enforcement and criminal justice, the extent to which tribal
justice systems have been inhibited by the presence of state/county jurisdiction, and the
effectiveness of cooperative agreements and retrocession in ameliorating any problems presented
by Public Law 280.
This study gathered qualitative and quantitative data from 17 confidential reservation
sites
— 12 subject to state/county jurisdiction under Public Law 280, four operating under the
more typical federal/tribal criminal jurisdiction regime, and one, a “straddler” with some territory
in a state covered by Public Law 280 and the remainder in a different state. Confidential
interviews were conducted with more than 350 reservation residents, law enforcement officials,
and criminal justice personnel. In addition, the study collected law enforcement and criminal
justice funding data from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Justice, and
conducted several case studies of cooperative agreements and the retrocession process based on
published sources. Framing our inquiry have been hypotheses drawn from prior research,
suggesting that effective police and justice systems in Indian country depend on the degree of
accountability of law enforcement and criminal justice to tribal populations,
as well as the
adequacy of resources to provide policing and court services.
Analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data indicates that reservation residents in
Public Law 280 jurisdictions typically rate the availability and quality of law enforcement and
criminal justice lower than reservation residents in non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions. A striking
pattern is that reservation residents and state/county law enforcement in Public Law 280
jurisdictions differ substantially in their evaluations of state/county law enforcement, with
reservation residents consistently providing less favorable assessments. In contrast, reservation
residents and federal/tribal law enforcement in non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions typically
provide more consistent or similar evaluations.
On the question of availability, state or county police serving Public Law 280
reservations are rated by Public Law 280 reservation residents as less available, slower in
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.
ix
response time, less prone to equally attend to minor or serious calls, provide less beneficial
patrolling services, less willing to act without authority, more frequently decline services owing
to remoteness, and are located farther away than federal-BIA and tribal police on non-Public
Law 280 reservations.
To assess the quality or effectiveness of law enforcement and criminal justice systems
under Public Law 280, we looked at knowledge of Public Law 280, cultural awareness and
sensitivity, communication with community members, fairness of treatment, thoroughness of
investigations, community willingness to report crimes to police, and responsiveness to
community priorities. Again, we found that reservation residents in Public Law 280 jurisdictions
rated police and court services lower than the counterparts in non-Public Law 280 jurisdictions,
or that reservation residents and police in Public Law 280 jurisdictions diverged more in their
assessments of service quality than reservation residents and police in non-Public Law 280
jurisdictions. We also found that, within each type of jurisdiction, tribal police generally received
higher evaluations from reservation residents than either state/county or federal-BIA police.
Tribal courts nonetheless receive criticism from reservation residents, mainly because of a lack
of checks and balances that give protection against family, community, and tribal government
politics.
With respect to funding for tribal law enforcement and criminal justice, federal funding
data from the Department of the Interior indicate that Public Law 280 tribes are receiving far less
than tribes subject to federal-BIA and tribal jurisdiction. Although data were difficult to obtain
from the BIA, we did determine that for FY 1998, non-straddler1 mandatory Public Law 280
tribes received less than 20% per capita of what non-Public Law 280 tribes received. And while
Department of Justice funding per capita is much more equitable between Public Law 280 and
non-Public Law 280 tribes, the percentage of Public Law 280 tribes receiving no funding at all is
much higher. Tribes in Public Law 280 jurisdictions are not receiving sufficient support to
mount their own police and justice systems, even though reservation residents are more satisfied
with services from tribal agencies where they exist.