Administration looks to crack down on Indian crime

"I'm never sympathetic to the argument that less information is a good thing," said former Colorado U.S. Attorney Troy Eid, a Bush appointee who has pushed for more vigorous prosecution of Indian cases and who also testified at the June Senate hearing.

Eid said that after the hearing he met with several tribal leaders in Arizona and the Four Corners areas, and they "were stunned and disappointed by Perrelli's testimony."

"There was shock because the talking points weren't any different (from the Bush administration) and in fact it was worse, because the expectations were higher," Eid said.

The public safety crisis for Native Americans has been brewing for years, but many tribal leaders say it is getting worse as drugs and violence sweep often isolated and impoverished Indian lands across the West.

At another Senate hearing Wednesday in North Dakota, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, Ron His Horse Is Thunder, said that there had been nine suicides and 50 attempted suicides in the small villages of the reservation since January, a phenomenon he linked directly to rising crime and hopelessness.

Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs added 12 new positions to the tribe's police force — doubling the size — none of those positions have been filled.

"There hasn't been an assistant secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs for four years, so there is a lot to be done," said Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff, when asked about the unfilled positions.

"We're coming up with ideas as fast as we can so we can implement them as fast as we can," she said.

But Sen. John Thune, a South Dakota Republican and member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, cited several instances of mixed signals by the Obama administration when it came to fighting reservation crime, including the administration's failure to fund in its 2010 budget an amendment passed last year devoting $750 million to do just that.

"My impression is that the administration is grappling with so many issue right now that this is something that may be falling through the cracks," Thune said.

"But I hope they decide to do something about this, because there is this pattern that has gone on from one administration to the next of benign neglect," he said.

"Many of these reservations are in parts of the country that are not visible, they don't have a powerful lobby in Washington, so conditions just continue to deteriorate and get worse."