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.
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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.
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
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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.
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.