Senator wants updated formula for tribal law enforcement funding

Seth Tupper
South Dakota Searchlight

A week after attending a roundtable discussion with the nation’s top law enforcement official and tribal leaders, Sen. Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, is urging the head of a federal department to change the funding formula for tribal law enforcement.

The U.S. Department of the Interior includes the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which provides police services to some tribes and funding for other tribes to operate their own police departments. Federal support for tribal public safety on reservations in South Dakota is required under the terms of treaties that date back to the 1800s.

Rounds’ office said Thursday that he had sent a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo and Laguna tribes in New Mexico.

“The funding formula for tribal law enforcement programs is failing the Great Plains reservations,” Rounds wrote.

He said tribal leaders across the Great Plains are reporting an increase in violent and drug-related crimes.

Rounds said the current formula for tribal law enforcement funding has only allowed Great Plains tribal law enforcement agencies to receive modest funding increases. The Crow Creek Sioux Tribe received $1.3 million in law enforcement funding about a decade ago and is funded at the same level today, Rounds said.

The letter does not propose a specific methodology for modernizing the funding formula, but states that it should be designed to “direct appropriated funding to areas of greatest need.”

The BIA’s Office of Public Affairs declined to comment on Rounds’ letter. The office says it does not communicate with members of Congress through the media.

The most recent edition of a BIA report required by Congress says the agency’s total expenditures on tribal law enforcement in 2021 were $256 million, but its total estimated need was $1.7 billion. When detention, corrections, and tribal courts are included, the report says, “Overall, Indian Country BIA’s public safety and justice is funded at just under 13% of total needs.”

Public safety funding was a central issue last week when Rounds attended a roundtable discussion in Wagner with representatives from all nine South Dakota tribes and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. The U.S. attorneys who work for Garland’s Justice Department prosecute serious crimes on reservations.

“I fully realize that our department cannot provide the full level of law enforcement assistance and agents that you need on the reservations, and that BIA needs more funding for that purpose,” Garland told tribal leaders at the meeting.

Janet Alkire, chair of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was in attendance and said some tribes face serious public safety issues on a daily basis.

“Until there is adequate law enforcement and public safety, our people will always live in fear,” Alkire said.

Before Garland’s visit, public safety on reservations was already a topic of debate in South Dakota.

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem gave a speech in January claiming that Mexican drug cartels operate on reservations, and she has repeated those claims numerous times since, even as law enforcement officials say drugs from cartels are a problem statewide and nationally. That and other comments from Noem led leaders of all nine tribes in the state to vote to ban her from their reservations.

Meanwhile, Noem has been working with South Dakota’s Republican Attorney General, Marty Jackley, to address the problems with recruiting and retaining tribal police. He offered a state-run law enforcement course for tribal recruits, so they wouldn’t have to travel to a BIA training center in New Mexico. Rounds has asked the BIA to consider opening a federal tribal law enforcement center in South Dakota.