Murkowski interview: Senator touches on Bethel visit, tribal law and order

Published on July 29th, 2010

By ALEX DEMARBAN

(Editor's note: On Thursday, July 22, The Tundra Drums interviewed Lisa Murkowski about her July 12 visit to Bethel to meet with organizations there. During the interview, she said she visited several groups, including the Association of Village Council Presidents and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp. Below are excerpts that touch on the places she visited and the Tribal Law and Order Act, recently passed by Congress.)

What did you do in Bethel?

I had not even been over to the Bethel police station in some years. You drive by and you can appreciate that it needs some help, more than a little bit of help.

It looks on the inside more cramped and crowded than from the exterior, thus confirming how important it is that we work with the city there to see what we can do to get them some better quarters.

It simply is not acceptable and I think we recognize that.

They had made a request to us for $1 million. That budget has not advanced so we don't know the status of that.

But just today, we passed out of appropriations committee, a couple of the earmarks affecting the Bethel area in the energy and water bill. There's $3 million in there for the Bethel river bank stabilization, and there's $1 million in the energy and water bill that goes to the bethel harbor. This is a pretty substantial increase over the president's request. He had asked for $766,000 and it's for the plans and specs for dredging of the small boat harbor.

We had chance to go through the YKHC hospital and look at the equipment. We looked at the CT scanner, talked about how those in the women's health clinic are traveling around to villages to do mammograms and the equipment is able to read the results right there.

There is some concern about new space requirements that will be an issue there. I look at what they are doing for services at YKHC, recognizing it's the regional hub for so many coming in for services.

We talked about how important it is to have good equipment, good facilities to attract the full-time professionals, what they're doing with some of the itinerants and how that adds to their costs.

We also went to AVCP and visited with Myron and Mike Hoffman and talked about fishing issues of course, but also had an opportunity to talk about their proposal at AVCP to gain some additional spaces there.

We had chance to go through a walkthrough at the one-stop shopping place where social services are provided in the region. It was like going through a rabbit warren. People are packed in pretty tight.

And folks are trying to do a good job, but we had a good discussion about why a new office building. There's over 300 employees. We know we have to work to provide a better facility.

What about the (recently passed) Tribal Law and Order Act, could that be a solution to help some of the suicides in the region?

The Tribal Law and Order Act I think we'll find will be very beneficial to tribes in the Lower 48. We have some pieces contained in that legislation which will be helpful for us.

We have a piece that allows for additional training for VPSOs at the New Mexico academy. It allows for state and tribal organizations to utilize the Community Oriented Policing grants. Those will be made available to us in the villages and as we talk about law enforcement. The availability of funding has been an issue so the ability to enhance that will help.

The piece that may make a difference is what we'll try do through the study of sexual assault and domestic violence, in terms of determining where the gaps are in the collection of forensic evidence.

Anyone who has experienced any kind of sexual assault, domestic violence, you want to move to act on it but if the evidence has not been collected -- because it's as simple as not having a rape kit in a village -- then the individual is violated once by the perpetrator, then violated a second time knowing this system doesn't allow for a prosecution and consequence to those that perpetrated the crime.

So we look at these and they are small pieces, but when you look at those things that contribute to a sense of hopelessness, of defeat, discouragement and depression, some of them can be exacerbated because you don't have that support in a community and when I say support, it is a law enforcement presence.

Is it the panacea? There is no silver bullet out there. But it can help and that's why we worked to include those amendments in there.

Early on in this bill's evolution, I think there was an effort to have some of the benefits for the Lower 48 tribes also apply to the Alaska Native tribal communities. What happened to that?

The jurisdictional issue was one where it was just not going to be within this bill that there would be any altering of tribal jurisdiction. So that was not something that was pursued, whether for Alaska or those in the Lower 48.

But we did try to advance a provision to allow for a demonstration project for a number of villages, to test out some different approaches to making rural Alaska safer, whether it's through the idea of therapeutic courts, how we could work together with public safety programs and involve the law enforcement agreements within tribal courts, working with the state and federal government, basically more collaborative and encouraging some innovative ideas.

It was a demonstration project with a $50 million cost to it. That caused some issues with some of my colleagues. And another concern was they felt that this was an Alaska-specific earmark and were pushing back on it as an earmark.

But you think about it, I did not view it as an Alaska earmark. It was a provision that was custom-tailored to the very unique geographic challenges that law enforcement faces in Alaska.

It is just unlike the Lower 48. We don't have the Bureau of Indian Affairs police patrolling Alaska Native lands. It is a different structure in Alaska.

I worked very hard to make sure that distinction was understood but the long and short of it is those who objected to it were prepared to kill the whole bill over it, so I agreed to pull the demonstration project.

I intend very fully to try to advance it through other vehicles that may present themselves. Because I still think we need to look and think outside the box as to how it is we can create some innovative approaches to making rural Alaska safer.

The models that are in place in other areas just sometimes don't work for us, so let us try some things out. We've seen some successes, in some of the therapeutic courts that have been advanced in some jurisdictions. I'm a big supporter of it.

We've got this revolving door system of justice at times, and unless we can be more creative about how we are approaching the problem and how we are dealing with the perpetrators, we're going to continue to get the same results.