Detention facilities used as jails for major national parks were left unattended and failed to meet federal safety requirements in Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks, a government watchdog said.
The Interior Department inspector general even recommended the Yellowstone facility be shut down until it complied with regulations. National Park Service officials at the park responded by implementing new policies that hewed more closely to the law, the report said.
There are 26 detention facilities in national parks across the country, according to NPS spokesman Jeffrey Olson.
Offenses that could land a visitor in a park jail include driving under the influence, possession of a controlled substance, assault, “crimes against property” and outstanding warrants, Olson said.
No security guards were stationed at the Yellowstone facility. Instead, suspects were left alone in their cells while officers watched on closed-circuit television from a quarter-mile away.
“Typically, detention officers only personally observe inmates when delivering meals or transporting inmates,” the report said. As a result, no officers at the temporary jail meant an emergency in the cells could go unnoticed or unaddressed for minutes, which could be “too much time.”
Even those who did monitor the inmates using video feed were not constantly watching their screens and only did so as “a collateral duty.”
“A Yellowstone employee told us that the park has been lucky to not have had any major incidents,” the IG auditors wrote.
Officers did monitor inmates at the Yosemite facility, but only on an “irregular schedule.” They also relied on CCTV for inmate supervision.
National parks having their own jails may seem like an odd arrangement, but the use of such facilities is not “inherently unreasonable,” Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
Law enforcement might otherwise have to travel long distances to transport suspects, depending on the size of the park, Larkin noted.
It’s the potential for park rangers to abuse their law enforcement ability that has created problems in national parks.
Larkin said such over-criminalization lies in the federal government’s “body count” approach to determining the effectiveness of its law enforcement agencies.
Instead of gauging its success by actual results, like falling crime rates, the government relies on metrics such as the number of arrests or convictions.
“In the national parks, it’s not clear that just increasing the number of arrests is going to lead to a decrease in crime, particularly if the arrests are for rather trivial offenses,” Larkin said.
“A lot of the provisions and the regulations and the statutes make it a crime to engage in some pretty trivial activities, and so increasing the large number of arrests and charges for trivial activities is not necessarily going to make anybody that goes to the national park feel safe and secure from violent crimes.”
Law enforcement jurisdiction varies among parks depending on the legislation that created them. In Yellowstone and Yosemite, the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction. That makes them off-limits for local police.
In 2005, the U.S. attorney’s office in Yellowstone became involved in 574 cases for offenses committed mostly in that park and in nearby Grand Teton National Park. By 2011, the office was involved in 1,012 such cases, according to the Department of Justice.
Those numbers don’t include the “large majority” of violations, which require only a fine, DOJ said.
Yellowstone has hosted 142 arrests so far this year, while Yosemite has seen 183, Olson said.
Olson said complaints about overly severe law enforcement by rangers are “isolated incidents.”
Go here to read the full report.
