INDIAN COUNTRY
Tribal Law Enforcement in New Mexico
Article and Photos by Sherry Benn
| Sherry Benn is a free-lance writer based in Albuquerque. |
Related Article:
Indian Country
Jurisdiction
| Illustrations: (select thumbnail to view detail image) |
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This article can be found on
page 32 of the Sept/Oct 1997
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
I was just pulling out of the local hamburger joint on Highway 44 into Bernalillo when I saw the yellow lights revolving on a charcoal gray Chevrolet Blazer as it sped past me with short bursts of siren.
This was just the guy I'd been trying to find all morning out at Santa Ana Pueblo. That's what Tewa Indian Tribal communities were dubbed by the Spanish settlers, and it stuck. Sure enough, there on the side was painted the silver logo of the Santa Ana Tribal Police. I crammed the hamburger back in the paper sack and took off after him.
I don't usually chase police cars, but I was getting desperate. When you're trying to locate one or two guys per shift on 62,000 acres of New Mexican high desert mountains, the odds of finding him are about the same as you might get shooting craps at the Tribe's Buffalo Casino, or Gaming Palace, as it's called these days.
I spotted an advancing ambulance in my rearview mirror, just as the Tribal patrol car veered left into the Giant Gas Station/Convenience Store with this reporter hot on his trail.
The reason a Tribal Officer was slamming to a halt at the scene just as a blond, blue-uniformed officer was climbing out of a white Sandoval County Sheriff's car remained obscure. We were in the village of Bernalillo, the County's jurisdiction. Perhaps the suspect was Indian? [While the designation "Native American" has come into vogue as the politically correct term for the `90s, those in the pueblos I visited refer to themselves as "Indians." I have followed suit.]
The answer would be obvious to any fellow policeman. Officer P.D. Lahi was just doing what's natural: backing up his non-Indian colleagues. The town and the Pueblo dispatchers use the same radio frequency. The transmitter sits atop the 10,678-foot Sandia Mountain, so dead spots aren't a problem, despite the vastness of the area.
Nobody had robbed the convenience store, as it turned out. No disorderly conduct. But an Anglo man's horse kicked him and, while the animal had him down on the ground, took a bite out of his back. Looked grisly. While the EMS team took over from his wife who'd driven him in from the farm in a pick-up truck, the officers and I stood in the bright sunlight and I started asking the questions.
The County officer made it clear he wasn't answering any questions about the "case." He gave me the name of his Chief. I reckon he's on a tight chain when it comes to sharing information with the public he's sworn to protect.
Not so with Tribal Officer Lahi. He politely answered my questions before suggesting I contact Sergeant Otero out at the Tribal Law Enforcement office at Santa Ana Pueblo for further information.
Officer Lahi was a Park Ranger and in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before joining the force. He likes being a Tribal cop.
"You know everybody," he says. "It's easier for me than for somebody who's not from here."
I asked him what was the hardest part of his job as a Tribal officer.
"Dealing with non-Indians," he said right up front.
Sergeant Eugene Otero said the same thing when I drove on out to Santa Ana Pueblo later that windy afternoon. Sand kicked up all over the place. A shredded black plastic garbage bag fluttered on the barbed wire fence. An elderly woman wearing a fuschia sweater, green socks and a purple scarf, sat in the sun on the porch of her adobe house, leaning on her cane and watching the yellow school bus rumbling along the washboard road. A facetious sign read, "15 mph," as if any sizable vehicle could go faster without jarring the driver's teeth out of his head.
Santa Ana's Police Department is located in an adobe building which also houses the health clinic and other tribal administration offices.
"Yep, non-Indians," replied Sergeant Otero, in answer to my question about the most frequent problem they deal with. "Vandalism," he said, "destroying property, like out on the playing field across the road."
And trespassing. History repeats itself.
I remembered seeing one of the elders at Taos Pueblo, a former Governor, giving what-for to a couple of tourists. They had ignored a sign posted to protect the tribe's private Kiva, the underground chamber where religious ceremonies take place. In large black letters it clearly stated, "No Visitors Beyond this Point."
"I thought you people came out here to teach us Indians to read," chided the Taos elder. "What happened to you?"
Non-Indians don't always respect a Tribal Officer's duty to enforce the law. A lot of folks, especially out-of-state visitors, don't realize practically every road in New Mexico runs straight through Indian land. It used to be a joke among locals that woe to us all if the Indians ever decided to exercise their right of jurisdiction.
It's no longer a joke. Two years ago, Pojoaque Pueblo, about 20 miles north of Santa Fe, the State capital, did just that. Pojoaque's Governor Villarial threatened to close Highway 44 if New Mexico's legislature didn't ratify gaming compacts already signed by State Governor Gary Johnson. 13,000 Casino jobs and $215 million in total income, currently being used to fund Tribal Law Enforcement as well as to build schools, roads, sewage systems, and health facilities, is not a sum to be sneezed at by a traditionally impoverished portion of our society.
After the Tribes had invested millions of dollars in construction and equipping casinos in more than half of the 19 Pueblos strung 180 miles along the Rio Grande, the Attorney General's office dragged some dusty swords out of the legal archives and started rattling them.
It was enough to make you want to go on the war path.
So the Indians hammered together a little toll booth which one April day stopped thousands of commuters trying to get to their jobs at the Los Alamos National Laboratories, where the atomic age was born smack dab in the middle of land peppered with cave dwellings of the ancient Anazasi, the ancestors of today's Tewa Tribal Officers.
In solidarity, Isleta Tribal Police, south of Albuquerque, stationed huge yellow earth-moving equipment along the highway, suggesting vividly their readiness to stop traffic with several tons of desert sand. Such is New Mexico's colorful way of dealing with disputes, a legacy of its history which provides more than just "multicultural diversity" for tourist brochures.
Officer Marcelino Toersbigns grew up in Isleta Pueblo and started his career in law enforcement working for the Tribal Police after four years in the Marine Corps. When he worked for the Tribe, their officers were neither State certified nor County commissioned, so they had no jurisdiction over non-Indians.
"That's where the BIA comes into play," Toersbigns explained. He now works for them.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs Law Enforcement Division is under the U.S. Department of the Interior. While Indian lands are sovereign unto themselves, Indian people are also citizens of the state in which they live as well as this country. Most federally prosecuted crimes in Indian Country are federal crimes simply because they occur on reservations where the New Mexico State prosecuting authorities have little or no jurisdiction.
It's sort of a one-way street, however. Cross-certification allows Tribal Law Enforcement Officers to arrest even non-Indians off the reservation, but State police and County Sheriff's deputies cannot enter Indian lands for any reason without permission from the Tribal Governor, unless of course they're invited as back-up over the radio.
BIA officers follow State statutes when they detain somebody for traffic violations.
"Most of the tribes are pretty much in agreement to follow the State statutes as far as traffic codes," said Toersbigns, "because none of the Tribes has its own traffic codes or travel ordinances. They do everything by traditional law which are things that happened a long time ago."
Some Pueblos have their own official police department, but others, such as Santo Domingo, Cochiti, and Jemez, only have tribal officials who respond to domestics and such. The Tribal Governor, in such cases, serves as Judge.
"They handle things through their own Tribal Way," Officer Toersbigns explained. "Their officials aren't equipped if a situation arises involving weapons."
The BIA gets involved, even if the Tribe has its own law enforcement team, if there is serious violence. Some crimes, such as drug trafficking and firearms, are federal crimes whether or not they occur in Indian Country.
Investigative responsibility for most felonies is in the hands of FBI agents and the BIA's criminal investigators. That, of course, doesn't mean the "lead" agency won't seek help from Tribal officers who are essential to point out any special cultural aspects that might affect the investigation and to translate the Indian language spoken by victims and witnesses.
Officer Leonard Armijo works with Sandia Pueblo Tribal Police, responsible for patrolling about 23,000 acres from the Rio Grande, all the way to the top of Sandia Mountain. Armijo is cross-certified by the State and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center down in Artesia, N.M. He's Hispanic, not Indian, and feels that gives him more perspective to deal with some of the crimes within the Pueblo.
"An officer who grew up here goes on a call," he says, "and he's related to the family." He says judgment can get a little clouded. "It's kind of hard to arrest your sister's boyfriend, you know?" He laughs. "They do it, of course, but it's hard on them."
(Marcelino Toersbigns knows what he means. "When I was working at Isleta," he says, "I arrested an uncle and a cousin, so I kind of lost my family there for awhile.")
Armijo, who previously worked for the campus police of the University of New Mexico, where he got his degree, and as a Corrections Officer at the State Penitentiary in Santa Fe, likes the community spirit in Tribal law enforcement.
"We had an accident down on 313 a couple of weeks ago," he said. "Rescue takes a while to get out here, because they have to come out from Albuquerque or Bernalillo, and about 15 families showed up with blankets and what-not, helping people."
The driver, it turned out, had left on foot, so Officer Armijo pursued him.
"I looked back and saw about six Tribal members coming with me. It was getting dark and I told them, `You guys don't need to be up here. You're putting your life in danger.' I didn't know if the guy had a weapon. But they insisted on helping me. `No, he's one of our people,' they said."
No one plays down the danger of the job. The vast distances don't help. If an officer is in Cochiti and his back-up is over the mountains in Jemez, that's 45 minutes away. And the low pay, ranging from $6 to $10 an hour, hardly compensates for the risk an officer takes every time he answers a call.
Indian Country comprises 25 reservations in the region from the Mescalero Apaches in southern New Mexico all the way to the Utes in southern Colorado and Navajo out west at Ramah, stretching across 4,566,771 acres with 3,085 miles or roads. What's the toughest situation to deal with?
"A manhunt," said Toersbigns.
"There's a lot of open country," said Santa Ana's Otero. "Lots of places to hide."
"Right now we have trouble, because we're so short-staffed," said Toersbigns. "On the day shift it's just one federal officer."
That officer has to cover the territory from Highway I-25 at La Bajada Hill at Cochiti, down south to Sandia, and out west to Zia and Jemez Pueblos. Has that caused any problems lately?
"We've been fortunate this year," he said.
And the Graveyard shift? That's an even worse scenario: One officer with no dispatcher. Toersbigns puts it succinctly:
"He's on his own out there."
