The Refuge Law Enforcement program is crucial. Refuge Law Enforcement officers are often the first – and sometimes the only – staff that a visitor meets on a national wildlife refuge. Moreover, Refuge Law Enforcement officers are on the front lines of conservation delivery, putting their lives at risk to protect wildlife and habitats, on wildlife refuges and on lands beyond the boundaries, and the people who use them. Officer safety, a top priority for the Refuge System, has advanced through ensuring that officers have the training, experience and equipment to do their jobs. Refuge Law Enforcement Officers enforce the law, regulations, and policy first and foremost, but also look for teachable moments and educate the public on the importance and relevance of conservation.
The Refuge System considers the top-to-bottom review of Refuge Law Enforcement by outside experts another significant accomplishment in the last decade. A report from the International Association of Chiefs of Police and a second Department of the Interior-wide review by the Inspector General resulted in mandates from the Secretary of the Interior to reform many aspects of the law enforcement program. The Refuge System is in the midst of implementing systemic changes in its law enforcement program including: developing policy and an organizational structure at headquarters, regions, zones and the field to adequately manage a law enforcement program; shifting to a cadre of all full-time officers; enhancing training for officers and law enforcement managers; developing an electronic case management system and using centralized recruitment and hiring.
In implementing these systemic changes, the Refuge System has also emphasized the importance of the conservation work that Refuge Law Enforcement Officers do. The Refuge Officer Basic School has been expanded to include waterfowl identification, hunting compliance scenarios, tracking and other resource-based enforcement classes. The Field Training and Evaluation Program has also been expanded to add thirty tasks to the field task book that directly relate to resource protection and investigations. These and other changes enable the law enforcement program to continue to develop strong conservation law enforcement officers.
Conservation law enforcement has been the first step in effective wildlife refuge management since Paul Kroegel patrolled the nesting bird colonies at Pelican Island more than a century ago. If wildlife refuges do not provide for basic public safety and resource protection, they will not succeed in accomplishing their purposes and the mission of the Refuge System. Any refuge officer in the Prairie Pothole regions can describe what will happen if wetland easements are not patrolled and laws not enforced. The habitat will be lost and the ducks will suffer.
Recommendation: Complete law enforcement reforms and staff wildlife refuges with sufficient officers to protect wildlife and habitat and make refuges safe places for staff and visitors.
Setting aside land and water for the protection of wildlife along with enforcing conservation laws are the oldest foundations of conservation delivery. They remain essential, but much else has changed.
Comment below and/or move on to next section of Chapter 2- Managing Wildlife Refuges for Biological Integrity, Diversity, and Environmental Health
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I wholeheartedly agree with the recommendation to staff wildlife refuges with sufficient officers. In the early 1980′s the US Fish and Wildlife had nearly 800 Refuge Officers. We currently have around 400, and with each year, it seems we cover more lands and face new challenges. I hope that we can hire and retain the finest conservation officers in the country to protect our visitors and Refuges.
President of the National Wildlife Refuge Officers Association
and Refuge Officer,
Rebecca Merritt
Staffing is only the first step, and I realize that this is only a vision document, but the implementation of this will have to include looking at how we recruit, hire, and retain the best and brightest. In the interim, local MOUs with other federal, state, and local agencies can assist our officers by making available other resources to do their jobs safer or tackle larger issues. The Southern Nevada Agency Partnership (SNAP) Law Enforcement Team is comprised of LEOs from USFWS, BLM, NPS, and the Forest Service. We work under a local MOU and have cross-delegated each other with authorities to work on each other’s lands. Together, we have accomplished whan no single agency could do alone. We have worked seemlessly across jurisdictional boundaries to protect public lands in southern Nevada and we have had many successes. Several times each year, we saturate problem areas with a dozen or more land management LEOs to address criminal activities. Hitting an area that hard with four different uniforms has quite an effect and we are able to work safer and smarter by pooling our resources. Visit http://www.snap.gov to learn more.
Thinking strategically, it would be refreshing to see an agency document that stressed working on Interagency Partnerships at the highest levels, but in a compartmentalized fashion. What I am saying is that FWS LE program manager should be meeting and strategizing organizational mixes with other land management program managers in WASO and they need to reciprocate. Land management agencies can no longer work independently on staffing and protection concerns; we have to figure-out a way to make larger shifts of field resources to address problems regionally.
LE innovation is the short way to phrase it.
Partnerships. It is hard to expect higher level managers to understand the minutia of resource protection and how it must be integrated with the interface of urban law enforcement. But what would be a strategic change would be the support that permeates the management arena. There certainly seems to be a lot of moral support by management for the protection and enforcement functions, but what doesn’t appear evident is the understanding of expectations of our roles. Not speaking specifically of FWS, but who is usually called first for almost any type of problem that arises on public lands? Officers of course; and they can usually address the issue immediately or know who can rectify it so the public is not endangered or put-out for too long.
If there were a metric for managers that addressed the removal of barriers to full cooperation between agency personnel and resources and not only cooperation, but a measured increase in using non-agency personnel for a variety of activities (not just LE), that would be a huge strategic step.
There is a Service First Office is WASO that should have a liaison from every DOI/DOA law enforcement agency that sits together as a planning unit for all of land management enforcement aspects. This could be one metric for measurement of partnerships.
More on partnerships.
Agencies are like any other entity, they fall back to their confort level when partnering gets difficult. What I have seen is that applied to officers, their comfort zone is expanded the more they work with officers outside their agency and normal routine. This is critical to creating effective partnerships. It is about the relationships that are created more than what is actually accomplished at any particular event. But there is another component that I don’t think is nutured enough and that is with academics. An ongoing interaction on a personal level between local universities and officers, supervisors, managers and the development of comprehensive programs to train, recruit, continually educate or re-educate and cross-educate among the many fields of study should be more widely supported.
Compliance. I am pleased to see the words “teachable moments” and “educate the public”. The central goal of resource management is public compliance with the mission of the Service through policy, plans and regulations. Officers in the field are truly the frontline of the Service’s outreach of its mission. Gaining compliance starts with understanding. Officers, as well as all frontline staff, need an understanding of the people in the area they are working in order to achieve the highest level of compliance. Officers need to be sensitive to communities and cultures involved through awareness training and just visiting for a cup of coffee. Attending public advisory committees or organizational meetings and just listening is another avenue to be locally sensitized. It takes time to build a support network for compliance but when it is made, we can focus our efforts on those who will never comply because we will have the eyes and ears of our support network.
Resource protection is vital to the success of the Refuge System. However, just adding officers to a refuge will not fully rectify the situation and needs. FWS needs to be hiring conservation officers, not those that just want to be an LEO for a federal agency. In many refuges ,law enforcement issues are drastically different than what you would expect to find in national parks or forests, so hiring needs to be adapted. I beleive that the public and resource are best served by someone with some sort of Wildlife degree and/or a lifelong hunting/fishing/outdoor recreation heritage, not someone with a criminal justice degree that does not understand basic ecological and management principles. Require a fish/wildlife related degree, the police academy takes care of the rest.
Also, what will be done with the more rural refuges that do not have the consistent workload to justify the hiring of a dedicated officer? Dual function manager/officers have the same responsibilities as a LE-duty only employee and look the same to the public–they often drive marked/equipped vehicles, same uniform, sidearm always worn etc, and have the same personal liabilities. They are an excellent asset to the agency and actually save the department money by not reducing the number of FTE’s in these refuges. They need to be compensated equivalently (or more due to the additional responsibilities) with equivalent benefits and retirement.
I hope the idea that changing the chain of command from non-law enforcement to law enforcement supervision is still being discussed.