Montana tribe, citing mounting tragedies, sues Biden administration over lack of police funding

by Ella Lee - 07/26/23 6:00 AM ET

Brian Wing still has the video on his phone.

After a domestic dispute, a front door video camera captured the moment a young man was hit by a fleeing car while he leaned his body halfway out a window. Hours later, the man was still laying there.

“The young man lays there, right there in the middle of the road, for three hours — even longer,” said Wing, a member of the Fort Belknap Indian Community Council. “No officer shows up, no ambulance shows up, nothing. He just lays there.”

In a different hit-and-run incident last year, the only officer on duty was called to the southern end of the Fort Belknap reservation in north central Montana, not far from the Canadian border.

The reservation itself is immense — 1,042 square miles in Montana’s vast, lightly populated plains. The officer responding to the hit-and-run was stationed some 40 minutes away from the incident, said Gary LaMere, a supervisory criminal investigator in Fort Belknap.

Alone, the officer identified the crime scene, the victim and a potential suspect, all while assisting the ambulance. But he did not test the suspect’s blood alcohol levels, eventually causing the department to lose its case against them, according to LaMere.

“This is a case where I believe we lost the evidence because it was only one officer on [duty],” LaMere said.

Such tragedies are not uncommon for residents of the Fort Belknap Indian Community, local leaders told The Hill.

For nearly 30 years, funding for the community’s police force has remained relatively unchanged, and requests to the U.S. government for additional funds since 2018 have been largely denied. Limited resources have made it more challenging for tribal officers to protect the community, increasing danger and distrust, the leaders said.

The Montana reservation sued the U.S. government in October after it was denied a request for $5.3 million in funding, which was an increase of $3.8 million.

“They’ve been neglecting us for over 23 years; we’ve exhausted all options,” said Geno LeValdo, a member of the Fort Belknap Indian Community Council.

“They just don’t seem like they care,” he said.

Fort Belknap is far from the only reservation that says it is suffering from such problems.

The Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana sued the DOI and BIA last July, claiming the U.S. government is not abiding by its treaty obligation to provide adequate law enforcement services. The Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota sued the administration, too.

“We think that this problem exists not just at Fort Belknap — it exists all over,” said Terryl Matt, a lawyer representing the Fort Belknap Indian Community. “So if Fort Belknap can make a change for all Indians in the United States, that would be great.”

The United States, the Department of the Interior (DOI), Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which maintains the relationship between the U.S. and tribal governments and facilitates support for the tribes, were named as defendants in the Fort Belknap complaint.

The DOI declined to answer questions for this story. The BIA and White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Following the money

In Indian Country, residents are served by tribal law enforcement or the BIA. BIA officers view themselves as federal officers, where tribal law enforcement is more akin to local police, according to Jeff Stiffarm, president of the Fort Belknap Indian Community Council.

The Biden administration’s budget for fiscal 2023 included a $2.8 billion investment in BIA programs, with $562.1 million directed toward public safety and justice programs. That figure includes $282.4 million for “boots on-the-ground police services.”

But those funds and others haven’t trickled down to tribal law enforcement, the leaders said.

“We don’t know where their money is going,” said Matt. “So that’s why we have the lawsuit.”

Fort Belknap’s current budget pays “a fraction” of comparable BIA positions, according to the lawsuit. A chief of police in the reservation is paid 50 percent of a BIA police chief, and six of Fort Belknap’s seven officers are paid 70 percent of a BIA officer’s salary, the lawsuit alleges.

LaMere, a Fort Belknap resident, served as law enforcement for the Fort Belknap community and several tribes overseen by the BIA. In a federal affidavit submitted on Fort Belknap’s behalf, LaMere said the community’s law enforcement funding is “barely enough to provide the most basic law enforcement services.”

Some 3,100 people reside within Fort Belknap and receive tribal law enforcement services across more than 637,000 acres, LaMere said in the sworn statement. The community has received about $1.2 million in total law enforcement funding each year since 1997, he said.

But as police chief for the Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico — where law enforcement, run by the BIA, serves about the same number of residents across its 463,000 acres — LaMere’s budget for personnel alone was more than $2 million, he said.

“We had enough patrol officers [at the BIA] to where we could do things proactively,” LaMere said in an interview. “Here at Fort Belknap, it just seems like we’re barely catching up — like we’re always behind.”

Stiffarm told The Hill that requests to the BIA for more money since 2018 have been met with “one-time funding,” not adjustments to their yearly budget.

More from The Hill

“I called it hush money — ‘Here’s your money; shut up and go away,’” Stiffarm said.

Without additional funds, the Fort Belknap leaders say they cannot hire for positions like victim specialist, program specialist, drug investigator, K-9 officer and drug dog, school resource officer or special agent for missing and murdered indigenous persons, according to the lawsuit. Each of those positions would help the community provide “adequate and modern law enforcement services,” the lawsuit claims.

‘Do your damn job’

The consequences have been dire for Fort Belknap residents, most of whom have been personally failed by local law enforcement, the leaders said.

Matt’s stepson died at 18 years old after a high school dance, freezing to death when friends kicked him out of their car, she said. Stiffarm’s son died at the same age; the reservation leader suspected foul play. Though both said they sought further investigation by law enforcement, they were denied.

“I told them … ‘I don’t want your condolences. I don’t want your pity. I want you to do your damn job,’” Stiffarm said. “Still never happened. And my story is the same as everybody else’s back home.”

“Living on an Indian reservation, when there is a death that involves criminal activity — off the reservation, it would be investigated. On the reservation, there’s no resources to invest in it,” Matt said. “That’s why we’re here. We want this changed.”

Tribal law enforcement’s limited funding also increases their risk on the job, the leaders said. In a federal affidavit submitted with the community’s complaint, Stiffarm said he regularly paroled the entire reservation by himself when working in law enforcement. If he needed back-up, other officers were often off-duty and nearly an hour away, he said.

“What happens there is people start losing faith: ‘They’re never going to respond, why bother?’” Stiffarm said. “When they stop calling, people start knowing that on the streets.”

And without proper support, tribal officers face increased burnout resulting in rapid turnover, LeValdo said.

“I wouldn’t want to die for 20 bucks an hour,” he said.

Calls for Biden administration to act

The Biden administration has touted its commitment to Native American communities, including the appointment of Haaland as Secretary of Interior. Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, is the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. But those efforts ring hollow without active support, the leaders said.

“[The administration] must think everything’s hunky dory because Secretary Haaland is Native American, when Secretary Haaland has never stepped up to help her own people,” Stiffarm said.

Matt said that BIA officials have been of little help with requests for additional funding, telling the tribal leaders to lobby Congress, not the agency, for the funds they seek.

“If that’s true — you can’t help us in any way — we don’t need you,” Matt said. “Your job should be gone because there’s no use for you.”

Montana is GOP territory in presidential elections, and Biden lost the state by nearly 100,000 votes to former President Trump in 2020. But he did edge Trump in Blaine County, in part due to voters in Fort Belknap.

More than 95 percent of voters in Fort Belknap’s precinct also cast ballots for Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) in 2018 when he narrowly won reelection, underscoring their importance to Democrats.

The lack of law enforcement funding could have political ramifications for the party, local officials said. As law enforcement’s limited resources exacerbate crime in the reservation, residents are turning to self-defense.

“Who has the message out there that ‘we’re not taking guns?’ The Republican Party,” Matt said. “The Republican Party is gaining ground in Indian Country because of that message, and I think it’s attributable to the fact that there’s no law enforcement.”

In January, the Montana state Legislature heard a joint resolution calling on Congress and the federal government to fully fund law enforcement agencies and services on Montana’s tribal reservations, claiming that “justice has eluded many Native American victims, survivors and families” and that insufficient funding has left “many injustices unaddressed.”

Stiffarm urged Biden to visit the reservation himself to see the impact “with his own eyes” and hear it from “our own people’s voices.”

“That’s the only way I think he would take a good picture of what’s really happening in Indian Country,” Stiffarm said.

Tags Bureau of Indian Affairs Deb Haaland Donald Trump Interior Department Joe Biden Joe Biden Montana