AMY FORLITI Associated Press Writer
MINNEAPOLIS Sgt. Bill Blake gave his anti-gang presentation to American Indian communities so many times, he says, that his daughter knew it by heart. Yet it wasn’t enough: “Dad, you have to do more,” he recalls her saying. Nearly four years later, 20- year-old Erica Rae Blake was dead shot in the head at a party on a Wisconsin reservation. Her death was ruled an accident, but memory is driving Blake to work even harder to fight violence on reservations. Blake set out to improve cooperation between tribal police, federal and local law enforcement, but quickly found a big obstacle: Nobody tracks hard data on crime occurring on tribal lands. With the help of another Minneapolis police officer, Larry Loonsfoot, and an expected $600,000 grant from the Department of Justice, Blake hopes to create a database that would give tribes a tool to spot trends, share information and track offenders who seek sanctuary elsewhere. “We’re never going to be able to address these problems and make things better in tribal communities when it comes to crime and quality of life unless we get the data,” said Blake, a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa. The goal is to collect the data in a central location so law enforcement and tribes can identify problems and apply resources where needed. “I think what’s unique about the Indian community is there is always some connection to the reservation,” said Loonsfoot, a member of Michigan’s Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. “We need to bridge that communication gap where we can directly enforce both ends.” Blake said the I-CARE project it stands for Indian Crime Awareness Research and Evaluation will start small, with the ultimate goal of creating a national database. Technology and money too little of both sometimes play a part in whether tribes collect and share crime data. A maze of overlapping jurisdictions hurts, too. For example, a crime on a Minnesota reservation may be handled by tribal police, a county sheriff, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the FBI or any combination of law enforcement. That means data are absorbed by different agencies and a true picture of crime on a reservation can be harder to get. Without good numbers, a tribe may have a hard time getting Grant money for a particular problem, or might not make the right choices for spending its crime-fighting dollars, Blake said. “Nationally, crime statistics from Indian Country are not collected well,” said Tom Heffelfinger, a former U.S. attorney in Minnesota. “It’s one of the real impediments to improving public safety in Indian Country.” The FBI collects crime data each year, but many tribal communities don’t participate. The Bureau of Indian Affairs doesn’t collect crime statistics. The Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes a report on American Indians and crime, but instead of tracking crime as it occurs, the data is collected by a variety of methods, including household survey. Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan said a database has “tremendous promise,” and is trying to line up computers, clerical help and space for Blake’s project, likely in one of the city’s American Indian neighborhoods. “The connections between the tribal lands and the city of Minneapolis are very strong,” Dolan said. “You see the same people that are involved in crime here are involved in crime there. There is a very selfish reason to want to create this database and create this sharing of information.” Ted Quasula, police chief of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe in Las Vegas was intrigued by Blake’s project. He said his department tracks crime, but doesn’t link its information with other jurisdictions. “Most criminals could care less about jurisdiction boundaries, in fact they enjoy it when jurisdictions fight,” said Quasula, a member of the Hualapai Tribe of Arizona. Sharing information is vital, he said. “If you kind of hole up and you’ve got your own island, it’s going to be detrimental in the long run,” he said. George Goggleye Jr., chairman of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in Cass Lake, Minn., was enthusiastic about Blake’s idea, too. He said his tribe has been keeping statistics in the seven years since it established its police department, and already shares data with surrounding communities. “It’s just been fantastic,” said Goggleye. With the words of his daughter still fresh in his memory, Blake is determined to help prevent more violence. “What I’ve learned is doing nothing will get your family killed,” he said. “So if I were to sit back and still do nothing and lose somebody else that was close to me, I couldn’t live with myself.”
