After twice introducing bills that would allow tribal police departments a path to certification by the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training — the first dying in committee before the second was vetoed by the governor last year — Ramos recently introduced Assembly Bill 31, hoping it will overcome the final hurdle this session.
Ramos asserts the bill is necessary to confront the state’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous People crisis and address ongoing public safety issues on reservations created by Public Law 280, which Congress passed in 1953 to transfer policing authority on tribal lands from the federal government to state law enforcement in six states, including California.
“The law resulted in fewer resources for public safety on reservations and created confusion among federal, state and local law enforcement jurisdictions,” Ramos said in a statement.
Last year’s Assembly Bill 2138, sponsored by the Yurok Tribe and supported by Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal, would have created a pilot program allowing police from three California Tribes (including the Yurok Tribe) to obtain state peace officer status, allowing them to independently enforce state law on tribal lands, make arrests and directly file reports with the district attorney’s office. The issue is not without complexity, though, as the tribes would have to waive sovereign immunity (which protects tribal governments from most civil litigation) and abide by state transparency laws, like the California Public Records Act. Those issues caused some tribes to oppose a previous version of the law, prompting Ramos to scale it back to a pilot program.
Yurok Tribal Police Chief Greg O’Rourke says the tribe has supported Ramos’ efforts since their inception. Ramos’ first bill was killed in the Assembly Public Safety Committee, O’Rourke says, because lawmakers supporting police reform worried it would result in over policing of marginalized communities. He says the Yurok Tribe then embarked on an education campaign, inviting the committee’s members to its reservation to show them how the tribe’s police department works, which proved successful.
“In this reform movement, one of the things we’ve found to be very helpful in getting Public Safety Committee members to believe in our movement and actually support us was looking at the inherent values that tribal law enforcement has of community-oriented policing and trauma-informed policing,” he says.
As to tribal opposition, O’Rourke says he understands why some tribes wouldn’t want to waive certain sovereign rights and come under certain state regulations and laws. Personally, having worked for the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office for 12 years, O’Rourke says he “wasn’t afraid of the requirements,” and thinks tribal departments obtaining state peace officer powers would be a boon for public safety.
“I believe it’s going to provide the most expedient means for competent law enforcement response in our community,” he says.
Honsal also supports Ramos’ efforts, and lauded the Yurok Tribe’s efforts to educate legislators, saying it allowed them to see that tribal policing is “sovereignty at its finest.” He says he was frustrated when Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed A.B. 2138, citing an unspecified “legal disparity” it would create between tribal and state officers as his primary concern.
“They are already deputized, already have state peace officer powers,” Honsal says of the Yurok Tribe, which operates under a cross-deputization agreement with his office that allows its officers to enforce state law. “They should not be supervised by me. Their power shouldn’t come through the sheriff, it should come through the state.”
Ramos’ office did not respond to a Journal inquiry as to how the latest iteration of the bill will address the governor’s concern.
Thadeus Greenson
This article appears in The Battle Over Bear River.
