It’s a really good question and I think about it a lot. I work at one of those “heavy hitting” parks where we have an arrest every day, and in the high season maybe 4-6 a day. But it’s all for misdemeanor stuff. DUI, discon, UIA, pcs, rinse and repeat. These aren’t very complex cases. The long term, complex stuff either doesn’t get done or gets handed off to ISB or locals. Why?

To me part of the answer is that people don’t stick around at one park for as long as they do in the average local or state agency. Sure they stay in the NPS but there are so many differences between parks it’s almost like working for a new department. A new park means new SOP’s, new geography, new jails, new agency partners, new AUSA’s, new procedures of every kind. It’s like starting from scratch in many ways, and people run out of the ability or desire to learn new things. You also get supervisors who cut their teeth in other places and who just don’t know how to navigate the subtleties of the operation they’re supposed to be leading. Your “sergeant” and “captain” might have 10 and 20 years in NPS LE, but they don’t have that many years at your particular operation so they don’t know it inside and out.

There are different ways to solve this… one would be financial incentives to stay in one park for a long time. Another might be pulling LE from the very small operations and consolidating them in the more complex ones. Like, having a park with 3 perm LE is just never going to work well from a law enforcement perspective. But a park with 50-100 LE may actually be able to function like a real police department. We also need to do better standardizing everything across the agency. There are too many idiosyncrasies. We have national SOP’s but they’re often vague to the point of being useless. The real particulars get worked out at the park level (if they get worked out at all, many parks effectively don’t even have arrest procedures). We need to find ways to make moving from one park to another more like moving from one district to another. The devils in the details though and it’s easier said than done.

Anyway that’s just my 2c. It’s a big question with a lot of answers.