Are Tribal Police the Best Law Enforcement Model?
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota has a solution to the lethal violence lately associated with racial identity. There is no equal opportunity posturing when tribal police are hired, none at all. It goes without saying that Indian police should patrol an Indian reservation.
To eliminate Elizabeth Warren types, the most current Oglala Sioux Tribe vacancy notice warns about the required “Degree of Indian Blood if claiming Indian Preference.” You won’t hear angry cries about racism when the police have to use lethal force.
Law enforcement by racial and ethnic peers has been the norm throughout history. The same is true today for most of the African continent and throughout Asia. Ask any citizen in Japan or the Central African Republic. Of course, the quality of the police force always parallels training and management standards in place.
Recent shootings in Louisiana, Texas, and Minnesota have renewed the perennial cry to have neighborhoods exclusively patrolled by members of the same race or ethnicity. A community activist in Houston says that “Only Black Police Officers Should Patrol Black Neighborhoods.” Even the Berkeley leftists of the 1960s advocated the same black-police-only policy. A similar article answers “Why more diverse police departments won’t put an end to police misconduct.”
Both tend to agree with the notion that segregation is already the norm in everyone’s life, though few are honest even to themselves about it. Just look at where your own home is located. Is it the same as your publicly professed political or social justice values? The problem tends to show up only with forced segregation, not voluntary. For example, being free to go to church (or not go) is fine, but being forced to go (or not) is something else.
Plagued with gangs and racial violence, other communities like Springfield, Massachusetts, have tried to adopt the US military’s counterinsurgency strategy to win the “hearts and minds” of native populations being preyed upon by ruthless insurgents like ISIS. Former soldier Gian Gentile has summed up why this strategy hasn’t worked, beginning with pacification by generals like Creighton Abrams in Vietnam to David Petraeus’s nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Counterinsurgency was destined to fail in Vietnam and the Middle East because soldiers were always the “invaders” however much they schmoozed with the locals. Even trying to live with the population didn’t work. Try telling US police to live in bad neighborhoods. It won’t happen.
