Headlines that lie? The title to this article makes it sound like government prosecutors are a bunch of jerks who let evil, nasty criminal go without being punished.

But when you get to the nitty gritty details you find that that half of all the criminal charges were dropped because the cops didn't have any evidence to arrest the people in the first place.

Of course that means the real problem is we have tons of cops out there who are falsely arresting people without any evidence.

Source

GAO: Half of tribal crimes unprosecuted

by Ledyard King - Dec. 14, 2010 12:00 AM

Gannett Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Crime on American Indian reservations is more than twice the national average, but only half of serious criminal acts are prosecuted.

Of about 9,090 cases referred for action nationwide from 2005 to 2009, federal prosecutors declined to take action on about 50 percent, or 4,506, the Government Accountability Office reported Monday. A lack of evidence was most often cited as the reason a case was not pursued. Almost an additional 1,000 cases are pending, according to the study by the GAO, the watchdog arm of Congress. [ translation: 50 percent of all arrests on Indian Reservations are false arrests where the cops didn't have a shred of evidence to make the arrest and violated the persons civil rights who they arrested. ]

South Dakota and Arizona made up about half of the cases federal prosecutors received, followed by New Mexico, Montana and North Dakota, which are states that have relatively large Indian populations and sprawling reservations.

Native American advocates say the numbers of "declinations" are troubling but not surprising.

"What's most disconcerting about these numbers is that they probably don't even tell the full story," said Katy Jackman, staff attorney at the National Congress of American Indians. "What they do confirm is, as we've known for some time, that declination rates in Indian country are a major problem."

The lack of evidence can be traced in part to a shortage of police on reservations. About 3,000 officers, a force smaller than Washington, D.C.'s Police Department, patrol 56 million acres of Indian country.

That's barely half of the level to meet adequate staffing, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That has contributed to violent-crime rates that are 2 1/2 times the national average.

More than one in three Indian and Native Alaskan women are raped in their lifetime, according to tribal leaders.

There is a big difference in prosecutions from state to state, the GAO report indicates. Of the 2,241 cases referred to federal prosecutors in South Dakota, 61 percent were declined. In Arizona, federal prosecutors turned down 38 percent of the 2,178 that came their way.

The head of the Department of Justice office that oversees the 94 U.S. attorneys across the country said a lack of prosecutions does not suggest a lack of effort.

Legal jurisdictional issues, geographic challenges and differences in tribal cultures often affect prosecution rates, as does the standard of whether there is a reliable witness or enough evidence to proceed, H. Marshall Jarrett, director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, wrote as part of the GAO's report.

A crime committed on a reservation may be under the jurisdiction of tribal, state or federal governments depending on who is alleged to have committed the crime, where it took place and how serious it is. Any crime committed by a non-Indian must be referred outside the tribal system.