Tribes Struggle With Violent-Crime Wave

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. —  Only two years ago, social worker Deannah Neswood-Gishey’s neighborhood on a hill overlooking the Navajo Nation’s tribal capital was peaceful. Picturesque.

That was before many of the hogans--the trailers and shacks surrounding her home of 30 years--became turf-war bunkers for gang members and hide-outs for derelicts who swill a toxic mixture of hair spray and water called “ocean.”

“A teen in that house was shot and killed a year ago with a shotgun, and over there a gang member recently burned to death in a Jeep when a Molotov cocktail backfired,” said Neswood-Gishey, 32. “A person in that trailer was stabbed four months ago. . . . Five young men have committed suicide here over the past two years.”

What is happening on the nation’s largest reservation underscores a tragic reality in many others across the West: An alarming rise in crime--particularly homicide and sexual assaults on minors--is ripping apart the things that connect people with each other and their culture.

The crime wave comes at a time when Native Americans--whose police, investigation and detention services have always lagged far behind this country’s poorest jurisdictions--are being blanketed with federally funded pilot programs to reduce social problems and violence.

So far, these strategies to curb gangs, substance abuse, alcoholism, chronic unemployment and abject poverty seem to have had little effect on crime trends that on some reservations now rival those seen in large cities.

Federal statistics illustrate the stark contrast between public safety throughout so-called Indian Country and the rest of the United States. On a per-capita basis, the nation’s homicide rate dropped about 22% from 1992 to 1996. During the same period, homicides on reservation lands rose 87%.

On this 25,000-square-mile reservation, which has seen about 75 gangs emerge during the past five years, the murder rate has skyrocketed to four times the national average--and nearly double the rate in Los Angeles.

In 1996, the number of murders on the Navajo reservation soared to 67, far higher than the average of 35 per year recorded for a decade. This year, the number hit 40 by mid-October and was expected to wind up in the low 50s.

The federal government wants to help. President Clinton has directed Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to develop by year’s end a comprehensive proposal to improve law enforcement and criminal justice on reservations.

“Just throwing money and resources at them may not be the answer,” said Tom LeClaire, director of the Justice Department’s office of tribal justice. “It may take several types of programs tailored for specific locations and problems before we see a reversal.”

In the meantime, the murderers are getting younger and the crimes more brutal in this economically depressed reservation of 165,000 people, most of them government workers, ranchers and welfare recipients.

In December 1996, two Shiprock, N.M., teenagers were charged with killing a father and son while they slept in the cab of an 18-wheeler loaded with M&Ms.; In July, a heavy-equipment operator found the body of a woman who had been beaten, stabbed to death and then buried in a sand pit. In August, a 29-year-old man was slain with a pickax after an argument over a $15 oil change.

On Oct. 4, a 16-year-old boy who had been beaten to death with fists, feet and possibly a baseball bat was discovered only a few blocks from Navajo Police Department headquarters. The boy’s stepfather, Leroy Nez, is selling scraps of metal, wood and wire at a local flea market to raise money for funeral expenses that totaled $2,625.

Seated at the dinner table in his tidy house trailer, the 36-year-old equipment operator winced at the memory of seeing “my boy’s bloody face” after police found the corpse dumped beside a woodpile.

Wadding up a napkin and tossing it on his kitchen table, he said: “His face looked like that. That’s what they did to my boy.”

The crime wave is stirring up a law enforcement hornet’s nest for the 319 Navajo tribal police who patrol a region the size of West Virginia. Essentially, public demands for protection are rising at the same time that budget-strapped agencies are being overwhelmed by realities over which they have no control.

For one thing, the Native American population is growing increasingly youthful, largely because of high fertility rates. The median age is 24.2 years, compared with 32.9 years for all Americans, according to the Census Bureau.

In recent testimony before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. Kevin Di Gregory warned: “The American Indian population will grow even younger into the next century.

“What this means for an Indian tribe like Gila River in Sacaton, Ariz., a reservation with significant gang activity, is that about one-half of the population is projected to be under the age of 18 by the year 2000.”

In October, police on the Gila River reservation near Phoenix had their hands full investigating drive-by shootings, suspected methamphetamine labs and reports of gang initiations that included mutilations of cats and dogs.

The largest obstacle facing reservation crime-fighters is a lack of funding for more officers, basic equipment and detention facilities. That problem is acute here, where Navajo police can only dream of owning a helicopter, a crime lab or cellular phones.

“We don’t have a homicide unit, a sexual-abuse unit, a gang unit, a property-crimes unit--even macro lenses for our cameras to photograph splattered blood,” lamented Dorothy Fulton, chief of criminal investigations here. “And we don’t have a travel budget, which means our investigators sometimes have to drive 12 hours to 30-minute federal court hearings in Salt Lake City, Utah.”

Navajo criminal investigators work out of a dilapidated building where bowed ceilings have leaked for seven years and “air-conditioning” is provided by opening doors and windows. The burglary unit’s office is a battered 1989 Chevrolet dubbed “Old Faithful.” Police cruisers limp along with faulty engines and cracked windshields.

The department’s communications system is dangerously inadequate. A year ago, 11-year veteran Navajo Nation Police Officer Hoskie Gene was strangled and beaten to death when he pursued two burglary suspects. Gene’s closest backup was 53 miles away when the killers beat him to the ground with a flashlight and then choked him.

The Window Rock Tribal Jail is a joke to criminals and police officials alike. It was so bad that 16 prisoners escaped before police learned that the facility’s back security door could be opened with a piece of wire.

These problems, coupled with increasing demands for overtime, may be starting to take a toll on the personal lives of Navajo officers. In September, two officers were charged with domestic violence, and alcohol-related problems are on the rise departmentwide, authorities said.

The Navajo Department of Public Safety is trying to stretch its annual $17-million law enforcement budget to recruit more officers from the reservation. Trouble is, they have done such a good job arresting drunks and substance abusers that few of the Navajos who apply for law enforcement positions can pass a requirement calling for a clean criminal record.

As police officials struggle to clean up their image, Navajo medicine men are warning that the proliferation of gangs, drugs, homicides and sex abuse is a direct result of the steady erosion of Navajo language and traditions--and cultural pollution imported by television and tourists.

Daniel Deschinny, attorney for the Dineh Spiritual and Cultural Society, put it this way: “The guardian spirits that reside in our hearts and in the air, water, mountains, trees and animals around us have turned their backs on those who are doing violence with their ignorance.

“Internalize the great spirit and you will avoid evil and do the right thing for yourself and those around you. Digression from this path is a disaster to oneself and the whole community.”

Young Navajo gang members, many of whom were reared in severely dysfunctional families, say it may be too late for that.

For James Wauneka, 20, the gang is his family.

Wauneka is leader of the notorious 200-member Cobra gang at the Rio Puerco Acres housing project, about seven miles north of Window Rock. The gang, he said, “respects me and protects me.”

Fellow Cobra member Donathan Yazzie, 19, nodded in agreement.

“These are my family, these homeboys, these Cobras,” he said. “What else is there to do? Where else can we go? We have no recreational places, no pool halls, not even a cinema here.”

Both young men, however, belong to an all-gang-member work crew that recently was filling potholes with hot asphalt for minimum wage in their 86-unit housing project. The crew--clad in the green-and-black hooded sweatshirts and bandannas favored by Cobras--was organized by Rio Puerco Acres manager Stewart Calnimptewa, a law enforcement officer of 20 years and owner of a security and private investigation agency.

“This place used to be a hellhole. Now crime is down and the units are cleaned up,” Calnimptewa said. “Why? We hired over 20 Cobras after giving them the skills and responsibility to do drywalling, house-painting, electrical repairs, roadwork.”

Still, none of these Cobras would even consider calling a truce with their rivals, the Dragons.

“As long as Cobras and Dragons are around,” one of the young men grumbled, “the gang thing will keep going on.”

That kind of tough talk breaks Shirley Yellowfeather’s heart. Trying not to cry, the 49-year-old Rio Puerco office aide said her 17-year-old son is soon going to become the first minor from the Navajo Nation to be sentenced in Arizona as an adult in a gang-related homicide case.

“The Navajos are supposed to be real close, but that way of life is dying away,” she said. “I was raised to get up at 4 a.m., greet the sun and then toss corn pollen in the four directions for wisdom and strength. I tried to get my son to do that and it was chaos. He’d yell, ‘Leave me alone!’ ”

But she also believes that some Navajo parents are partly responsible for their children’s behavior.

“We parents failed these kids because we all came from dysfunctional families,” she said.

Neswood-Gishey, a child protective services social worker who averages 200 clients a month--90% of them on welfare--would not argue with that.

But she is not about to wait for things to get better in her troubled neighborhood. Neswood-Gishey and her husband are building a new home in a village about 50 miles away. They expect to move early next year.

Until then, her 9-year-old son is receiving shooting lessons from his father because, she said, “you never know what might happen.”

“When will this violence end?” she wondered aloud. “Maybe we’ll have to wait until all these gang members kill each other off.”

“We’ve lost a whole generation here,” said Navajo Police Sgt. Frank Bradley as he patrolled homes marked with fresh gang graffiti and riddled with bullet holes.

“I’m hoping we do a better job with the younger ones.”