Tribe To Rule Reservation Police Fort Peck Board To Get Final Say, Hopes To Clamp Down On Crime

Struggling with crime that includes a murder rate 13 times greater than the state figure, tribal leaders at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation intend to take greater control over law enforcement, starting Oct. 1.

That is when the Executive Board for the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes will have a contract for Bureau of Indian Affairs police work.

BIA officers now provide law enforcement on the reservation and will continue doing so, but under the new contract, the board will have the final say over how the police force operates.

For police officers, one of the first orders of business will be eliminating late-night house parties and get-togethers at the New Bridge, a popular hangout on the reservation. There, up to 100 men and women have been known to gather in the wee hours, sometimes setting fire to a heap of tires for warmth.

Three years ago, the tribal board went on record with instructions for the BIA to break up the parties, but to no avail.

“Probably 90 percent of the murders occur after 2 a.m., after the bars close,” said Stoney Anketell, one of five people elected last fall to the 12-member Executive Board.

“If we continue to allow these all-night parties where people drink themselves into oblivion, then you won’t see a reduction in our murder rates.” In the last 1 years alone, 12 murders have occurred on the reservation. Over the last five years, the number of murders and suspicious deaths reached 23.

That is an average of 4.6 slayings a year, in a population of fewer than 11,000. It is the equivalent of 25 homicides a year in a city the size of Great Falls, which reported eight murders last year.

Families of murder victims on the reservation blame alcohol abuse and what they believe is a faulty system of justice. They say the tribes have failed to confront the crisis. People trying to analyze the crime rate also point to Fort Peck’s unemployment rate of 58 percent.

Tribal leaders say they intend to beef up the police force, now made up of 11 people, down from the 14 employed before BIA budget cuts.

Leaders of the tribe face a much steeper challenge than hiring more officers, however: They need to overcome the widespread belief that criminals with friends in high places get off easy.

Pearl Hopkins is a veteran member of the tribal council and remembers when it supervised law enforcement before. That was in the early 1980s, and “it was a holy terror,” she said.

Routinely, police officers would refrain from arresting suspects “because they thought they were a councilman’s relative,” she said.

Anketell believes the shift in supervision of law enforcement will end the days when police officers are free to file incomplete reports - hampering prosecutors’ ability to pursue a case - or fail to show up in court, forcing a judge to drop the charges.

Tribal judges and most tribal prosecutors still won’t be required to pass the American Bar Association exam. But prosecutors will report to a new director of public safety who has a law degree, Anketell said.

The U.S. attorney for Montana, Sherry Scheel Matteucci, has pledged to put a part-time prosecutor in Wolf Point, to expedite murder and assault cases that take place on the reservation and therefore come under federal law.

On the reservation, the rule of thumb is this: Crimes committed by non-Indians against other nonIndians are handled by city police. Indian-on-Indian crimes are handled by tribal police or the FBI. Crimes committed by non-Indians against Indians are the federal government’s responsibility.