South Dakota study disputes Indian crime statistics

A Republican state official who has opposed tribes on land-into-trust, jurisdiction, voting rights and sovereignty has set his sights on long-held statistics about crime in Indian Country.

In two studies, the Department of Justice reported that up to 70 percent of violent crimes against Indian victims were committed by non-Indians. The data has been used by tribal advocates to call for more law enforcement funding and to restore tribal jurisdiction over non-Indians.

But South Dakota attorney general Larry Long, who earlier this year opposed tribal jurisdiction in a critical U.S. Supreme Court case, claims the numbers are wrong. In a new article, he says the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the agency that authored the DOJ reports, has misstated the true nature of crime in Indian Country.

Based on state data, nearly 73 percent of Indian homicides were committed by other Indians, Long wrote. From the U.S. Attorney's Office in South Dakota, the authors said 97 percent of homicides were Indian-Indian crimes.

"From our analysis, we found that intentional homicide is predominantly intra-racial in South Dakota, contrary to the BJS findings," the article stated.

Despite arriving at a different conclusion than BJS, Long acknowledged that the homicide rate on reservations in South Dakota rivals metropolitan Chicago and is even higher than Los Angeles and New York City.

Moving onto rapes, Long said state data showed 69 percent of Indian victims were assaulted by other Indians. The federal data showed 99 percent were intra-racial rape cases, according to the article.

"Contrary to the BJS's national findings, rape is predominantly intra-racial in South Dakota," Long wrote.

At the same time, the state data showed that Indian victims were 37 percent of all first and second-degree rape victims despite being only 8.3 percent of the population. This disparity was comparable to that found in the BJS study, which showed that American Indians were five times as likely be the victims of rape.

"South Dakota reservations had a forcible rape rate of 25.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2004; a rate that was lower than Los Angeles, but higher than New York City," the article stated.

Long further stated that Indians in South Dakota are 10 times more likely to be targeted for crime by other Indians than by non-Indians. Most Indian victims know their perpetrators, he added.

The article acknowledges that Indian crime statistics in South Dakota are unique in some critical ways. The biggest factor is that the overwhelming majority of the Indian population in the state resides on reservations.

Most, but not all, of reservations in the state are majority Indian. So crimes like homicide and rape are more likely to occur among Indians, the article stated.

"In the rural context within and around Indian country, American Indian violent victimization rates tend to be opposite of the urban setting," Long wrote. In most other states, the urban Indian population outweighs the rural Indian population.

The majority Indian presence on reservations also means crimes involving Indians end up in the federal justice system. So the data from the U.S. Attorney's Office in South Dakota reflects nearly exclusively Indian-Indian crime patterns.

Full article: http://www.indianz.com/News/2008/009833.asp