Tribal police departments in Washington employ police officers who have been fired at a disproportionate rate, according to new reporting from InvestigateWest.
At the state level, tribal law enforcement only makes up about 2.5% of the police force, but they hire four times more officers who were previously fired or resigned in lieu of termination than other departments.
Melanie Henshaw reported on this issue for InvestigateWest and joins us to share more.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI tools and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. It’s not uncommon for police departments in Washington to hire officers who have been fired from other departments, but the practice is four times more common among tribal departments. Melanie Henshaw is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She reported on this for InvestigateWest and she joins us now. It’s great to have you back on the show.
Melanie Henshaw: Dave, thank you so much for having me again.
Miller: You started your recent article with a story of a former police officer named Phineas Haglin. Can you tell us what happened at a tribal casino outside of Spokane in 2021?
Henshaw: Right, Phineas Haglin, who was working as a detective for the Kalispel Tribal Police Department. was walking around during a Darius Rucker concert that was going on at the tribal concert venue when he tried to cut off a woman from drinking alcohol, and he was not wearing a clear police uniform at the time, he was wearing a mix of civilian clothes and police uniform. And in the process of this arrest, the woman didn’t realize he was a police officer, and he tackled her to the ground, pulled out her hair extensions, and in the process of radioing for help from other officers, this woman was arrested.
A later investigation into his conduct found that his attempt to arrest the woman was unlawful because he was not clearly identified as a police officer. The kicker is, he wrote his police report, his signed affidavit, stating that the woman had aggressed him, pushing him backwards hard enough that he stumbled two steps. He didn’t realize at the time, because he asked a security guard who falsely told him there was no video footage, that a security camera had captured the incident and the fact that he had subsequently lied in his report.
Now, several years later, he was ultimately decertified by the Washington State Criminal Justice Commission. But that was not the first time that he had been fired from a police department.
Miller: What were you able to piece together about his career before he was hired by the tribal department outside of Spokane?
Hebshaw: Hagelin had been working as a police officer for more than 30 years, and during that time, he had worked at a total of 11 police departments, and at least three of those departments fired him in total, including Kalispel.
Miller: How does his story, just one individual among dozens, or more than dozens, fit into the larger picture of fired officers or officers who resigned pending sort of misconduct investigations, how does that fit into the picture that you were able to put together?
Henshaw: His story shows how, despite the fact that officers can be fired and continue to move between departments, the level of information shared between the departments might not be comprehensive. And in addition, that the bar for an officer to be decertified by the state is relatively high.
Miller: How many times have some officers – besides Haglin – been fired in total? Or maybe another way to think about this is, how many different departments might some officers work at after being fired or leaving under sometimes mysterious circumstances over the course of their career?
Henshaw: We looked at a total of more than 11,000 employment records, and that included more than 1,000 cops who had been fired.The majority of officers who have been fired really only rack up one termination during the course of their career, but oftentimes they bounce around under unclear departures several times. However, I did look at dozens of officers who had been fired two or more times, sometimes three or more times.
Miller: What kind of data was available to you? I mean, how were you able to get these numbers?
Henshaw: The data I received was from the state commission that maintains all the notice of hire and notice of fire documents, essentially; which is a document that the agency is required to record whenever they hire or fire someone, let them resign, etc. In addition to that, I looked at a lot of disciplinary records, employment records, and internal records that are maintained by police agencies.
Miller: The two numbers that stand out, and I’ll try to say this slowly because they get a little bit confusing, but 11%, if I remember this correctly, of the officers who were fired and who went immediately to another law enforcement job, 11% of them ended up at tribal police departments, despite the fact that in Washington, only 2.5% of the total police force are officers on tribal departments. So it’s more than four times disproportion there. How do you explain that? What’s happening?
Henshaw: Tribal police departments are in a really unique position. The federal government has trust and treaty responsibilities to provide law enforcement services to tribal police departments, and they’re historically drastically underfunded. So these departments, which are funded through a combination of federal grants and allocations and tribal revenue when available, often have serious shortages in terms of what they’re able to offer in pay and benefits. Most tribes don’t have the ability to offer any sort of pension, which is a huge draw for somebody who wants to work in law enforcement.
But ultimately, these tribal departments are under-resourced and dealing with serious staffing shortages. Sometimes they may be forced to accept either an officer who has a less than desirable employment record or no officer at all. Native American communities are suffering really high rates of victimization on tribal lands, so public safety is a priority for a lot of tribal governments, leading them to sometimes make these more questionable hiring choices.
Miller: Does tribal sovereignty play a role in this? I mean, Indian nations, you note, can hire officers as sovereign nations that are not certified in Washington State. So how much of this is an exercise of sovereignty as opposed to a lack of resources?
Henshaw: When we look really specifically at the data that was part of our analysis, we’re looking only at information that’s available because tribes have entered into an interagency agreement with the state. As such, as part of that agreement, all the officers whose employment data we reviewed are essentially subject to the same requirements as any other police officer in the state of Washington.
So, while tribes can and do hire officers that would not be able to be certified, as long as they don’t work with the certified officers or non-tribal agencies, the tribal police departments can have them. That is the exercise in sovereignty. When we look really specifically at these wandering officers that are part of my analysis, all of these officers are subject to the same certification requirements as non-tribal officers because they are certified.
Miller: And that’s where you find that, in a sense, as you’re saying, they have so little money, many of these tribal departments, that they have a terrible choice: either don’t hire officers to police tribal land or pay only enough that you’re only likely, in some cases, to be able to attract “bad actors,” or people who have real negative marks in their background.
Henshaw: Right. And up until 2024, tribal departments were responsible for more than 75% of all training costs if they chose to send an officer to the state’s basic training academy, versus if they were to hire an officer who had already been trained and certified elsewhere, they would be saving a lot of money, tens of thousands of dollars.
Miller: What does the research show about the likelihood that fired officers who move to other departments will commit misconduct going forward, will somehow misbehave again?
Henshaw: They’re far more likely to commit all types of misconduct. That ranges from violations of professional standards all the way up to things like sexual violence and excessive force.They’re also more likely to be fired again and receive more civilian complaints.
Miller: It’s because of this that a Duke law professor that you talked to said that, “Hiring a wandering officer,” – the name for these officers – “always poses a risk.” And then he added this: He said, “It’s especially true when it comes to tribal departments.”
Why is that? Why might this problem be even worse in the places that have even more of these so-called wandering officers?
Henshaw: You’re taking officers who are known to have a history, potentially, of misconduct, and placing them in communities that are historically over-policed. Native Americans are the ethnic or racial group that is most likely to face deadly police violence, and they’re less likely to exercise their freedom to seek recourse or sue the department and speak out in instances where there is misconduct by police. So there’s a real concern among the critics I spoke to that you’re placing officers with a history of misconduct in communities that are especially at risk for police misconduct.
Miller: We’re focusing for a little bit there on the financial bind that many tribal police departments find themselves in, but I’m still curious, maybe just to take a step back, about how this is even possible in the first place.
If someone is fired after having been accused of misconduct or they resign after serious accusations, how are they able to be hired again in the state at all?
Henshaw: This gets a little bit at one of the major problems that we look at in this issue, which is a backlog of more than 1,500 cases that the Washington State Criminal Justice Commission is dealing with right now.
Essentially, even if an officer is fired and the firing agency reports misconduct to the State Commission, or a civilian files a complaint alleging misconduct, there’s so many complaints, there is a backlog that sometimes takes years. And during that time, an officer remains certified and they can find employment elsewhere.
Miller: While they remain certified, meaning they have not yet and that they may never be decertified, how much information would a potential new employer, tribal or non-tribal, have? I mean, it hasn’t fully been adjudicated, as you’re saying, but would the HR department of some local tribal or non-tribal police department have access to information about, say, what the allegations were?
Henshaw: When I spoke to the Commission, they did tell me that a hiring agency would have access to the complaint that had been filed. But as you said, it would not yet be investigated, so the information would be limited.
Miller: And that’s where we get, I guess, back to the question for these hiring managers, do we hire this person anyway? Nobody else is knocking on our door or applying for the job that’s open right now.
Henshaw: Again, this comes back to the agencies who are ultimately the ones deciding to hire these officers. They have legal responsibilities to conduct thorough background checks, including contacting all of the officers’ prior employers and seeing if they have any misconduct in their past. The agencies that are choosing to hire these officers have at least some level of awareness.
Miller: Did any of those agencies agree to talk to you about their hiring practices?
Henshaw: Not on the record. Folks who I did speak with felt like funding is a concern, but at the same time, they did tell me that there are a lot of officers who retire from regular law enforcement, non-tribal law enforcement, and move to a tribal department afterwards because they’re able to maintain their pension through the state because it’s a separate jurisdiction. In that sense, it definitely poses questions as to why they would continue to hire officers who may have misconduct in their history instead.
Miller: Just briefly, we have about 30 seconds left. What did you hear about this from Washington lawmakers?
Henshaw: Lawmakers are very concerned about this. They are worried about the implications that this poses for Indigenous communities who are at risk of disproportionate violence, but they also are aware of the limitations posed by tribal sovereignty in terms of legislating on what tribal conduct can be.
Miller: Melanie, thanks very much.
Henshaw: Dave, thank you.
Miller: Melanie Henshaw is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She is an Indigenous Affairs reporter at InvestigateWest. Her latest article focuses on the fact that tribal police departments in Washington disproportionately hire officers who were fired or who resigned in lieu of termination.
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