PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Freedom is outraged.

Astride a black steed, the Lakota teenager berates the two tribal officers for failing to arrest the house full of partyers, people he called his enemies.

Only minutes before, Leonard Her Many Horses and Dan Hudspeth were driving 85 mph, sirens blazing in the cool spring night. The boy had called them here to Manderson, a small village northeast of Pine Ridge.

But now, after shouting at them, Freedom has angered Her Many Horses, who asks him if he’s been drinking.

The question prompts the boy to steer his horse in the opposite direction.

“Why don’t you arrest them?” he yells as he rides away. “They were the ones drinking.”

The officers watch helplessly as he gallops off.

“How do you chase someone on a horse in a car?” asks Her Many Horses.

And how do you fight alcohol on a dry reservation?

James Two Bulls has been asking himself that since he became police chief for the Oglala Sioux Tribe two years ago.

He directs a force of 88 officers on a piece of land the size of Connecticut. He is fighting a battle he doesn’t believe in and is far from winning.

His main opponent: Alcohol.

In Whiteclay alone, more than 4.5 million cans of beer a year are sold to the reservation’s 15,500 residents. And every drop of it is illegal. Pine Ridge has been dry throughout most of its 115-year history.

“I think drinking is a basic civil right that the rest of America enjoys,” Two Bulls says. “But it’s the will of the people, and we’ve got to enforce it.”

The alcohol ban appears to have done little to stem the tide of alcohol-related problems.

About 44 percent of reservation car crashes in 2003 were alcohol-related, according to tribal police statistics. That’s compared to Minnehaha County, S.D., home of Sioux Falls, where about 8 percent of accidents were alcohol-related that same year.

Alcohol-related accidents also accounted for 10 of the 16 traffic fatalities in 2003 in Shannon County, boosting fatal crashes in the county higher than any other in South Dakota.

What the alcohol ban has done is exasperate Two Bulls and further burden his underfunded, understaffed department.

A high turnover rate, lack of experience and inability to gain convictions only compound the problem, he says.

But Two Bulls is not quitting.

“If we come across anybody that’s drinking, they’re subject to arrest,” he says. “This is a dry reservation.”

v v v

Dan Crazy Thunder knows this face.

He realizes this as he tries to awaken the man passed out behind the steering wheel of a red Pontiac Grand Am.

“Eli, wake up man,” the 30-year-old tribal officer says, shaking him.

“No way,” the man says, pulling himself from his stupor. “This is my car.”

“You can’t drive. You’re drunk, and I have to take you in.”

He jerks the man from his car. In the back of the cruiser, the man begins shouting and pounding on the cage.

Crazy Thunder tries to ignore him.

“There’s no reason I should have to pick up my own people,” he says, driving away.

This is the life of a tribal officer.

Long hours, long, dark roads too often seen as a blur while driving 90 mph to get to the next call. The awkward responsibility of having to arrest familiar face after familiar face. The pain of losing friends angry at you for arresting them.

Tribal officers have set up checkpoints to stop people from bringing in booze from border towns, Crazy Thunder said. They’ve busted countless parties, detaining youth so determined to escape they hid themselves in nearly frozen creeks. And they’ve arrested adults so angry they’ve kicked out cruiser windows and slugged officers.

Those who disagree with the ban often blame police, says Crazy Thunder, on the job for more than seven years. “(But) you gain new friends, and you gain respect.”

Still, their efforts often seem wasted.

“It’s really hard to control alcohol on the rez,”he says.

v v v

Somewhere on the reservation, a mother mourns her son.

Can you see Judy Merdanian holding up her son’s photos?

Bart in red cap and gown graduating from high school.

Bart graduating from college.

There’s one missing.

“Bart got a master’s degree but never went to graduation,” the mother says, sobbing as she tries to explain. “He had to work that day.”

She imagines superimposing her son’s face onto a photo of someone else’s son being handed a graduate degree.

Four years ago, Bart, 32, died when a drunken driver slammed into his Buick, killing Bart and two cousins. The driver, an off-duty tribal paramedic headed home after a night of heavy drinking in a South Dakota border town, had been cited 17 times by tribal officers for alcohol-related offenses, including 12 for driving under the influence.

But Gene New Holy had never seen a courtroom — until he rammed into Bart’s car. The crash occurred just off the reservation, meaning New Holy got the justice he had escaped on the Pine Ridge  — 15 years for each person he killed.

“He had 17 different arrests and kept doing things until he had 18,” Merdanian says. “My son was 18.”

On the reservation, few offenders lose their licenses as a result of driving drunk, police say. That’s because South Dakota state law does not recognize tribal convictions for driving under the influence, a loophole that allows drivers to retain state-administered licenses despite their crimes.

It is only one example of the tribe’s inability to punish offenders.

A recently completed U.S. Department of Justice study conducted through the Oglala Lakota College on Pine Ridge found tribal courts secured just 10 convictions from 646 cases filed in 2002.

“Many cases go unaddressed as a result of the criminal justice system failing to act,” says Paul Robertson, lead evaluator for the study. “It’s a revolving-door system.”

He attributed the courts’ inability to gain convictions to a lack of resources and staff to handle the enormous caseload.

Police Chief Two Bulls said tribal courts around the country suffer the same problem, which he also blames on a lack of funding. It’s a problem that has affected his officers’ morale, he says.

“If they know a case isn’t likely to be prosecuted, they might not be as proactive on patrol.”

The study, which also examined trends in public safety, found that in 2003 the tribe’s police department had a 52 percent turnover rate. That same year, only 23 percent of the tribe’s officers had four or more years of experience and more than half had less than two years.

“They’re always retraining, always watching over someone, always showing someone the ropes,” said Jake Little, a study evaluator.

Two Bulls conceded he’s struggled to keep experienced officers.

The stress of the department’s  caseload — 52,898 crimes investigated in 2003 — causes many experienced officers to quit, he says.

Repealing the alcohol ban, he says, would significantly reduce that caseload. It would also relieve the tribe’s overloaded jail, which is designed to hold 28 people but can see as many as 200 in a single weekend.

“In the end, it’s the will of the people, what they want,” Two Bulls says. “We’ll just do what we got to do.”

Two Bulls has had successes.

He has paid off much of the department’s outstanding debt, and he has improved its communications system by combining its two dispatch centers and getting a $2 million federal justice grant to buy satellite communications equipment. That equipment, he says, has allowed officers to contact each other in parts of the reservation previously unreachable by radio.

But challenges remain.

In September, a federal law enforcement grant now paying the salaries of 59 tribal officers runs out. Whether the department will be able to continue employing those officers remains to be seen, Two Bulls says.

“I’ve always told our officers, ‘Don’t worry about that. That’s out of our hands. Just do your job.’”

v v v

The call comes at daybreak.

Officers near the high school have stopped a Jeep Cherokee loaded with kids suspected of shooting out 10 windows around Pine Ridge the previous night.

Officer Ron Quilt slams the accelerator.

Once there, he and partner Tony Long Soldier help pull six teenage boys from the Jeep, as well as an unopened can of Hurricane malt liquor, Marlboro cigarettes, and, finally, a black BB pistol.

“I only shot one out,” a boy wearing a black jacket says.

Another boy bangs his head against the backseat cage as officers load the boys into their cruisers. They take them to the juvenile detention center in Kyle and charge them with vandalism.

“It took us all night,” Quilt says. “We finally caught them.”