The Thin Green Line

ith its bucolic vistas and soul-soothing forest trails, Shenandoah National Park seems to be a perfect place to forget your troubles. But visitors who come seeking solace should remember that criminals frequent the park too.

There were 16 robberies and aggravated assaults in the park last year, 320 cases of vandalism and disorderly conduct and 98 drug violations. Some of the nation's most sophisticated poachers prey on the park's wildlife and plants. Dozens of poachers have been arrested in recent years for killing bears and selling their organs to manufacturers of Asian medicines and their claws to jewelry makers. And last spring, a man was indicted for the murder of two women hiking the Appalachian Trail through the park in 1996. The indictment was delivered as the accused killer was just starting to serve an 11-year sentence for the 1997 attempted abduction of a woman-at Shenandoah National Park.

Ranger Dixon Freeland tries to keep the bad guys at bay. And he seems ready for anything. The husky 45-year-old has been trained at federal police academies, packs a pistol and wears a bulletproof vest under his green and gray Park Service uniform. But Freeland's lifeline is the radio he is supposed to use frequently as he patrols the park's famous, 105-mile Skyline Drive or investigates reports of trouble in the backcountry. "Minimally," Freeland explains, "what a law enforcement officer wants is for someone else to know where he is."

But rangers can't always call for help at Shenandoah. Its 1950s-vintage radio system can't reach vast areas of the park. "Seven forty, one eleven," Freeland barks into his radio as he steers his patrol SUV along the highway. There's no response, so he tries again: "Seven forty, one eleven." And again: "Seven forty, one eleven." At last, the dispatcher replies through static: "One eleven. You're barely readable."

"We're at one of the highest points in the park, and they are having trouble hearing me," Freeland says. "You know what that means? If you're in one of the places a ranger needs to be in Shenandoah National Park, and you need help, you're screwed."

Freeland is not the only park ranger who's vulnerable. The Park Service's thin green line is facing a worsening crisis. Three rangers have been killed in the line of duty in the last four years. The latest, Ranger Kris Eggle, was shot to death by drug smugglers at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border last August. A 2001 Justice Department study showed that park rangers are assaulted more frequently than other federal law enforcement agents. Rangers are injured or killed in assaults at an annual rate of 15 per 1,000-three times the frequency of the next most vulnerable group, Customs agents.

IMMINENT DANGER

The threat to park rangers is no surprise to the National Park Service. Eggle's death came after four reports by government and outside investigators, all criticizing law enforcement in the parks. All the studies concluded that the ranger corps is understaffed, poorly managed and ill equipped. Unless the agency acts quickly, the reports warned, the nation's precious natural, cultural and archaeological resources-and the rangers themselves-face imminent danger.

Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney, in a scathing January 2002 report titled "A Disquieting State of Disorder," emphasized the dangers posed by drug trafficking and illegal immigrants passing through Organ Pipe and other border parks. Devaney noted that park superintendents frequently failed to adequately staff law enforcement positions in dangerous spots in an attempt to prevent rangers from appearing "too much like cops." To illustrate the Park Service's lax approach to law enforcement, Devaney told the Senate Finance Committee in January that Organ Pipe had, at that time, only three permanent law enforcement rangers-three fewer than when Eggle was killed.

"Out of 25 recommendations, we only used the word 'immediate' once to describe the urgency of a needed reform. This was with regard to our recommendation that staffing shortages, which pose a clear safety risk to law enforcement officers, be identified-immediately," Devaney told lawmakers. "Over a year has passed since that recommendation was formally made and, to our knowledge, no serious attempt has been made by the Park Service to complete this task."

Asked why the service hasn't acted, Devaney replied bluntly: "I have never seen an organization more unwilling to accept constructive criticism or embrace new ideas than the National Park Service. Their culture is to fight fiercely to protect the status quo and reject any idea that is not their own."

Devaney and the other evaluators recommended increasing the number of law enforcement rangers by at least 615 and up to 1,295 full-time employees just to keep up with the explosive growth of the park system over the last 20 years. During that time, the acreage of parkland, the number of visitors and the amount of criminal activity in parks exploded while the number of rangers rose just slightly. Since 1978, national park acreage has grown by 170 percent, to more than 84 million acres, while the number of law enforcement specialists rose by just 25 percent, to 1,465 rangers. Today, each ranger is responsible for about 61,000 acres, more than double the territory assigned in the 1970s.

Clinton administration Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt appointed an investigative panel to study law enforcement in the parks. The panel warned the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in a 1999 report that inattention to police work already was threatening the rich natural and cultural heritage sites the Park Service was supposed to protect. "Because the national park system is vast, criminal activity is often successfully concealed," the panel said. "The onslaught takes its toll incrementally, almost imperceptibly. To many park visitors it is so incremental that it is a nonissue. To the trained eye, however, it is a crisis. In time, it will be too late or too expensive to reverse."

TOO FEW RANGERS

But the Park Service's contingent of law enforcement rangers has declined since the harsh evaluations began in 1999. In fact, the agency has 18 fewer rangers than it did four years ago. Dennis Burnett, the Park Service's top law enforcement official, says the agency's efforts to expand its ranger corps have been undermined by a lack of money and an expansion of duties in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and last summer's Western wildfires. "Congress has not given us the money we need," Burnett says, "and we've been given two more No. 1 priorities-homeland security and wildfire protection."

Rangers have begun leaving the Park Service for better-paying jobs at other federal agencies whose need for law enforcement officers has exploded because of homeland security needs, Burnett says. Meanwhile, rangers who are committed to the Park Service are getting frustrated because staffing shortfalls are making scarce the kind of backcountry work that rangers love. People who became rangers because they wanted to help hikers, for example, are now spending almost all their time on patrol or being called off to sit with M-16s in front of important national symbols, such as Independence Hall and the Statue of Liberty, or critical infrastructure such as dams.

"We're going to have to spend $30 million this year for gas masks and other equipment for homeland security and send our rangers away from parks on security alerts. And we're also being told at the same time that fighting fire is our highest priority," Burnett says.

"So we're being forced to pull armed rangers off the borders and elsewhere that they're needed. What else can we do with conflicting No. 1 priorities and a declining workforce?"

Even before the recent wildfire and terrorism crises, rangers have been instructed to enforce new laws strengthening protection of natural and cultural resources-the 1979 Archaeological Resource Protection Act, 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act and 1996 amendments to the Resource Protection Act. "And while we were being asked to do more, the money we needed to do the job never came through," Burnett says.

President Bush's $2.36 billion Park Service budget request for fiscal 2004 includes some additional money for improving security at border parks. The big budget item is the more than $700 million requested to reduce the backlog of facilities maintenance projects. Other than emphasizing the importance of protecting visitors at border parks, Park Service Director Fran Mainella did not mention any law enforcement problems in her March testimony before the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee.

But Randall Kendrick, executive director of the U.S. Park Ranger Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, says Congress isn't giving the Park Service money to hire new rangers because the agency isn't asking for it. Indeed, a 2000 study of Park Service law enforcement by the International Association of Chiefs of Police notes that the agency increased overall spending by 56 percent and staffing by 2.5 percent between 1994 and 1999, but the number of rangers declined by 149 positions, or 8.7 percent, over that period. And the slide is continuing.

A frustrated Ginny Rousseau, chief ranger at Shenandoah and Burnett's wife, has had to cope with five vacancies on the park's 30-person law enforcement ranger staff. In addition, four law enforcement rangers have been dispatched to do homeland security work elsewhere. "We've always said we can do more with less," Rousseau says. "So in many ways, we became our own worst enemies. We can try to do everything, but that means we can't do anything very well."

Even before the Organ Pipe shooting sent shock waves through the ranger corps, Rousseau began implementing new patrol schemes to bolster the safety of rangers. The first thing she did was order rangers never to work without a supervisor knowing their whereabouts. In the past, she confesses, the park has had lightly trained seasonal rangers-temporary employees-patrolling Skyline Drive alone at night without any backup. "We just cannot let that happen anymore," she says. "When Shenandoah is particularly low on staffing because rangers have been drawn away on homeland security details, for example, Rousseau "shrinks the park" by closing sections of the main road. She took the steps to ensure safety with the backing of an unusually supportive superintendent, Doug Morris, a former law enforcement ranger.

The shifting of responsibilities to focus on greater law enforcement safety has led to some frustration among rangers at Shenandoah. They are all working overtime and not working the jobs that lured them to the Park Service in the first place. "There really isn't time anymore to patrol the backcountry," says Ken Johnson, a criminal investigator at Shenandoah. "This causes a morale problem among rangers who may have joined the agency to do just that. A ranger now isn't going to see the backcountry unless they are going back there to rescue somebody."

Rangers are known for being able to handle just about anything. Freeland, for example, began his career as an interpretive ranger-an educator and guide to park resources-before moving into law enforcement. He's now a full-fledged police officer, an emergency medical technician, a backcountry specialist proficient in rescuing stranded climbers and a naturalist capable of teaching visitors about park resources. "We like the challenge of wearing all the hats," Freeland says. "But some of our activities can conflict with one another. And they can sometimes prevent us from doing as good a job as we need to to protect resources. We're no longer doing a very good job of that."

TOO LITTLE LEADERSHIP

Shenandoah's law enforcement rangers answer directly to a superintendent with a background in law enforcement, which is unusual for the Park Service. Outside evaluators blamed the Park Service's law enforcement woes partly on poor law enforcement management by park superintendents, most of whom have backgrounds in concession management, facilities maintenance and engineering, not law enforcement.

The Chiefs of Police report in October 2000 described assignment of law enforcement rangers at national parks as "patently illogical and erratic." The asso-ciation recommended that management of law enforcement rangers become the responsibility not of park superintendents, but of a law enforcement specialist at Park Service headquarters in Washington. "The law enforcement function is not getting the leadership required to meet current and future demands," the association report says. "It lacks a sufficiently powerful champion and, at the national level, the organizational/structural position to exercise the voice it deserves." Rangers agree. They told association researchers that superintendents are not held sufficiently accountable for law enforcement conditions and practices and don't pay close attention to police work in the parks.

Interior IG Devaney says most park superintendents are not qualified to supervise law enforcement. "We do not consider a superintendent who has taken a two-week course in law enforcement at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia to be a professional law enforcement manager," he told the Senate Finance Committee in January. Devaney's investigators were told about superintendents who ordered rangers not to carry weapons so they would not offend park visitors. One group of eight rangers reported that their superintendent was diverting money appropriated for law enforcement to other activities.

Superintendents strongly oppose any move to take the responsibility for law enforcement management away from them. "A manager doesn't want anybody in the park that doesn't work for them," says the superintendent of a large Southeastern park who requested his name not be used. Devaney says the Park Service is unwilling to turn over control of law enforcement to a professional because it would be an acknowledgement of the importance of police work in the parks. "We simply do not believe that the service can bring itself to publicly say any national park is dangerous," he says.

But rangers are not afraid to speak out. They are concerned not only about their own safety in remote areas but also about the increasing threat to the natural resources they joined the Park Service to protect. The U.S. Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police has begun releasing an annual list of what it considers the 10 most dangerous parks. First on its latest list-issued before Eggle was killed-is Organ Pipe. Shenandoah is fourth because of its dismal communications system. Freeland can't hide his frustration over the lousy radios in the park he loves. "It makes me angry that a bad radio system could put me in danger and make a widow of my wife," Freeland says. "It makes me angry because it can be prevented."

The cost of fixing Shenandoah's antiquated radio system is $4.7 million. And Shenandoah is not the only park with a bad radio system. In its 1999 report to Congress, the Park Service put the cost of fixing its communications systems at $115 million. The goal is to complete the conversions to modern narrow band technology in parks by Jan. 1, 2005, in keeping with a congressionally mandated goal for converting all federal radio systems.

TOO MUCH TO PROTECT

Park Service law enforcement is unusual even though all protection rangers have federal law enforcement training. The agency is first and foremost focused on protecting natural and cultural resources. The 1916 National Park Service Organic Act requires extraordinary protection of these resources-to preserve them "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

"Park rangers have the most difficult job in law enforcement," says Skip Wissinger, an undercover law enforcement agent at Shenandoah. "They have to protect these areas that were set aside because of their extraordinary value to the nation. Our parks are the closest thing we have to holy places."

Preventing criminal or even accidental activity resulting in harm or loss puts intense pressure on law enforcement officers. It requires them to understand the root causes of crime. That means that Park Service officers must know a lot not only about criminal enterprises but also about unique resources at each of the Park Service's 388 units. It requires an understanding of the market forces related to the exploitation of natural resources. That can range from orchids at Big Cypress National Preserve in South Florida to the burgeoning drug trade on the Southwest border and the dumping of hazardous wastes at Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park in California.

Because of Eggle's death and immigration concerns tied to homeland security, the Park Service's struggles in the Southwest have been in the national spotlight. The agency manages six units along the Mexican border for total of almost 1.2 million acres and 371 border miles, or 18 percent of the 2,069-mile border with Mexico between San Diego and Brownsville, Texas. Just 33 rangers work in those parks, and that includes naturalists and interpretative specialists as well as law enforcement rangers. Yet in the Tucson Sector of the border, which includes Coronado National Memorial, an estimated 30,000 illegal immigrants cross into the United States each month. A force of 8,000 Border Patrol officers also patrols the area, but few of them can reach rugged and remote areas of Coronado in time to assist the rangers.

Johnson says no one should be shocked that crime and other societal problems have moved into the parks. "When national parks were first opened, they were isolated Western entities," he says. Now, development has sprawled to the edge of parks and wilderness areas. "We can't consider ourselves isolated from the world," he says.

But Shenandoah, just a 90-minute drive from the Washington metropolitan area, never really was isolated from the world. Before Shenandoah became a national park in 1936, its lowlands were farms and pastures. To create the park, residents were bought out and oaks, hickories and other trees allowed to repopulate the once-cleared land. Reforestation allowed Congress in 1976 to designate 112 square miles of the park's almost 280 square miles as wilderness areas.

In recent years, the park has been under siege. Hazy air from power plants and traffic has clouded the park's famous vistas. Encroaching development along the park's edges is chewing away habitat for deer, bears, bobcats, turkeys and other animals. And poaching has begun to take a toll on the park's plants and wildlife. Well-organized poachers have depleted the American ginseng once common in the park-the plant is a critical ingredient in Asian medicines.

To fight increased poaching, Shenandoah has organized a three-member undercover investigative squad to supplement the effort of patrol rangers. The squad evolved from an investigation that began in 1996 and included the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state of Virginia. Investigators targeted poachers who were killing bears to sell their organs, claws and teeth for Asian medicine and jewelry. The sting operation netted 52 arrests. A follow-up investigation in 2001 nabbed another 20 people. "These kinds of operations are continuing," Wissinger, the park's special agent, says. "We have only scratched the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we've only just learned that there is an iceberg."

Rousseau and criminal investigator Johnson have been trying to further develop police work in the park in cooperation with scientists and naturalists. "The theft of artifacts and resources has become a very big business-part of an $8 billion worldwide enterprise," Johnson says. "Our approach to law enforcement has to evolve to face that threat." Scientists at the park have developed plans to manage backcountry camping and limit illegal fires, enabling Rousseau to redeploy rangers to investigative work. "By working smarter," she says, "we have been able to spend less precious time patrolling for some of these routine problems."

But Shenandoah officials haven't been able to reassure a wary public spooked by the hiker murders that the park is not a dangerous place. Annual visits fell by 300,000 since the murders, down to 1.4 million last year. "Those were the kind of murders that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck," Johnson says. "So when people ask if it's safe to come back, they want us to tell them that we have plenty of rangers. And we can't assure them of that."