The Navajo Police Department is the only tribal police agency in the country that trains its own officers. The department's protection mandate is both a pact with its culture and an oath to the law.
The task of finding a young Navajo man to take the badge is explored in great detail in Max's new documentary series, “Navajo Police: Class 57,” co-directed by Kahlil Hudson, Alex Jablonski and David Nordstrom.
Stars: Eldon Foster, Nora Allen, Lucy Dan
The Navajo Nation spans 17.5 million acres, but only has 180 police officers to serve its people. Although the department estimates that the country's more than 170,000 residents need 500 officers, it has difficulty finding recruits who can fully serve the Diné, the Navajo word for its own people.
While “duty” is a word often invoked by police, it takes on a different tone in Navajo country, which is guided by the concept of “k'é,” or a sense of kinship and mutual responsibility for lives, culture and the history of the Diné.
“From a young age we are taught that everyone is related and that we must have kinship and k’é,” explains activist Shandiin Yazzie in the series. "It's like walking up to a random stranger and being willing to help, because that means you have a responsibility to each other."
In practice, those deep personal connections can make policing on tribal lands extremely complicated.
Navajo cadets must learn to balance being “not just a warrior, but also a marriage counselor, a therapist, a shoulder to cry on, or a kind of social worker,” Nordstrom told HuffPost in an exclusive interview.
Having often endured the same kind of generational trauma as the people they patrol, Navajo police officers seem to feel a gap between protecting their communities and perpetuating the kind of violence that has devastated the Diné. That thorny history also means that it's not uncommon to find the Navajo Police Department responding to, or even arresting, members of your own family.
According to Jablonski, the need to break those patterns is what drove many recruits to take the job.
“You see community policing in this very real and raw way,” he said. "A big part of the motivation for a lot of cadets was, 'I don't want my community to be treated this way.' I want to treat everyone like they're relatives.'”
“Navajo Police: Class 57” was filmed during the department's 28-week training program last year. Hudson said many in the class were wary of their firearms or any use of aggression, given their own experiences with police.
“One of the young officers said several times, 'I don't want to be a typical police officer. I don't want to be one of those cops who is just an alpha male who kicks down doors. I want to come in with understanding and understanding of what people are going through,'” Hudson recalled.
While k’é guides the Diné, the shortage of officers on the Navajo Nation leaves little time for a compassionate approach. In walk-through scenes, police officers are seen rushing alone from incident to incident, often spending up to an hour to get to each case amid reports of people waiting up to days for an officer to respond.
It is under this pressure that we meet Class 57 and the 28 recruits who begin the seven-month program. Week after week, a combination of brutal training, personal problems and poor judgment drastically reduces the roster.
Those sorties ended up being one of the most difficult parts of filming for Nordstrom, who said he saw several cadets "ready to become really cool, useful officers," before "poor decision-making" got in their way. .
“To see that very understandable and totally relatable things, like making a youthful mistake, have profound consequences for your career was really sad,” he said.
Hudson, a member of the Tlingit and Haida tribes of Alaska, said he and his co-directors aimed to balance the more sobering parts of the series with images of “joy, humor, celebration of family, tradition and culture.”
Meeting Cadet Antwan Gray was especially encouraging for Hudson, who said he watched Class 57's youngest recruit grow from a shy, chubby boy to a confident man in his eyes.
"In the end, he looks like an officer," Hudson said. "He's confident, but he's still dealing with these demons like everyone else." The Navajo Nation's sovereignty, or legal right to self-government, makes the reservation a unique testing ground for determining what a community-based policing approach might look like.
When asked if the Navajo Police could provide a framework for other law enforcement agencies, Jablonski told HuffPost it was impossible to say.
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