Crime rates tick up across national parks

The National Park Service (NPS) is a huge organization whose 20,000 professionals and 125,000 volunteers oversee 388 parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites, lakeshores, recreation areas, scenic rivers and trails, and the White House. Their security and law-enforcement responsibilities include more than 18,000 permanent structures, 8,000 miles of roads, 1,800 bridges and tunnels, 4,400 housing units, 700 water and wastewater systems, 400 dams, and 200 solid-waste operations.

While Yellowstone National Park had the biggest number of violent incidents directed at park service officers last year (16), nearly half the total took place in urban areas where US Park Police patrol: the National Mall, the Statue of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridge, the Camp David perimeter, and dozens of parks and parkways in the Washington, D.C. area.

For some critics, this raises questions about why there are fewer US Park Police today than there were before 9/11, even though the park service's law enforcement budget has increased $42 million in the last three years and officers now get more training.

Last year, US Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers was fired for speaking out against the dangers of understaffing at places like the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. With help from whistle-blower organizations, she is fighting her termination.

In a report last summer, the National Parks Conservation Association, a private organization, noted that the number of commissioned permanent and seasonal rangers had been declining in recent years while the number of park visitors was rising.

Noting incidents of vandalism, arson, burglary, and theft, including stealing old-growth redwood trees and poaching of black bears for use in Chinese medicines, NPCA warned that "a shortage of law enforcement rangers has a direct impact on park resources."

"The Park Service's on-the-ground law enforcement capacity has been further eroded by the demands of homeland security," the group stated in its report, titled "Endangered Rangers."

"The agency has estimated that it spends $63,500 each day that the nation is at orange alert," according to NPCA. "This diverts funds from the parks' operating budgets, and when rangers from parks such as Rocky Mountain and Shenandoah are sent to guard dams and icon parks, their positions remain unfilled."

More recently, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) expressed concern about the ability of the Interior Department - of which the National Park Service is part - to maintain adequate security in the post-9/11 world of heightened alerts due to potential terrorist attacks.

Based on interviews with Interior and Park Service officials, GAO reported that "the department's law enforcement staff is already spread thin ... averaging one law enforcement officer for about every 110,000 visitors and 118,000 acres of land."

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