JOMAY STEEN / Rapid City Journal | Posted: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 6:00 pm
PINE RIDGE, S.D. — By April 1, the Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Public Safety will lose 59 officers from its law enforcement duties on the nine districts of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Capt. Patrick Mills of Pine Ridge said that by the end of March, a Community Orientated Policing Services, or COPS, grant from the U.S. Department of Justice will end.
With its completion, 59 police officers will clear out their lockers, check in their uniforms and firearms and turn over their badges.
Twenty-nine officers will remain to do what they can to keep the peace, but everyone in the department and the tribe will be affected, Mills said.
Mills, who was hired in December, said he has walked into a department that has low morale.
Beyond losing services to the community, timely responses to emergency calls and aiding in criminal investigations, the 59 officers have the added worry of finding new jobs or leaving the reservation to pursue law enforcement careers.
“Like everyone else, our people have families to feed and bills to pay,” Mills said.
Police Chief Ron Duke said 88 officers now patrol the 1,800 miles of roads covering the 3.2 million acres of land to serve the 50,000 people who live on the reservation.
Because of the reservation’s vast land, population density and crime rate, Duke said the department ideally would need 150 officers to operate effectively in answering the nearly 3,000 emergency calls received by its 911 Dispatch Center each month.
But because of the nation’s growing deficit, the war in Iraq and federal budget cutbacks at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Justice and Indian Health Services — all of which contribute toward the funding of the reservation’s law enforcement budget — the department’s budget supports only 29 officers, Duke said.
“The Department of Justice appropriated $18 million for 500 tribes to fight over for their entire law enforcement operations. It’s ridiculous,” Duke said.
To combat the personnel shortage, Duke said, the department will try to develop nine precincts — one in each of the reservation’s nine districts — before the grant’s end. The plan is to keep police within minutes of the scene of an emergency call, rather than the time it takes to drive from either Kyle or Pine Ridge, the former police headquarters when the department operated within two divisions.
The 911 Dispatch Center will remain in Porcupine. Each district has offered free office space for the patrol officers, he said.
Quick response and adequate numbers of trained police officers answering emergency calls for vehicle accidents, law enforcement and the investigation process concerns the department as well as the tribe, he said.
“It’s crucial to have our officers on scene,” Duke said.
Monica Terkildsen, OST Department of Public Safety grants specialist, said her office has been calling South Dakota’s congressional delegation, sending letters to other tribal and federal agencies to find sources of revenue for its law enforcement personnel budget.
Terkildsen said Duke would appear before the House Appropriations Committee in March to testify about the OST department’s law enforcement shortage.
She worries about what this situation will do to the communities within the reservation.
Of the 13,651 arrests made in 2005, 10,284 — or 67 percent — were for public intoxication, but meth is beginning to creep into the communities, too, she said.
“Substance abuse is a huge issue here,” Terkildsen said.
If something doesn’t change, two-thirds of the police officers who answer domestic disputes, medical emergencies, provide security at the hospital or public meetings won’t be there, she said
“We just don’t sleep well, thinking about what might happen,” Terkildsen said.
Contact Jomay Steen at (605) 394-8418 or jomay.steen@rapidcityjournal.com.