The FBI of the National Park Service

...The elite special agents assigned to the ISB—the National Park Service’s homegrown equivalent to the FBI—are charged with investigating the most complex crimes committed on the more than 85 million acres of national parks, monuments, historical sites, and preserves administered by the National Park Service, from Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. They have solved homicides, tracked serial rapists hiding in the backcountry, averted kidnappings, and interdicted thousands of pounds of drugs. They’ve busted a reality TV host who poached a grizzly bear and infiltrated theft rings trafficking in looted Native American artifacts. But the ISB remains relatively unknown to the general public and even to fellow law enforcement. Local cops and FBI agents are sometimes baffled when Yosemite-based ISB Special Agent Kristy McGee presents her badge in the course of an investigation. “They’ll say something like, ‘What do you guys investigate? Littering?’” she told me recently. There’s a pervasive idea that crime doesn’t happen in our national parks, that these bucolic monuments to nature inspire visitors to be more noble, law-abiding versions of themselves. But parks are filled with people, and people commit crimes. Millions of visitors pass through national parks every year (Yosemite alone saw over 4 million visits last year), and despite the trill of birds and the majesty of the redwoods, they misbehave in ways that would be familiar to any big-city detective: they drive drunk, they rape, and they assault. “People who abuse their kids at home come to the park and they abuse their kids here,” McGee says. The baroque, headache-inducing way jurisdiction functions in the United States means that, generally speaking, when crimes are committed on Park Service land, the county sheriff or local cops may not be in charge; the park service would be. There are more than a thousand park rangers with law enforcement training who handle most of the day-to-day trouble, but when a case gets serious, the ISB steps in. Sometimes their work is akin to that of the FBI: investigating crimes committed by some of the millions of park visitors. In other cases, the work is more like that of a small-town sheriff’s department...ISB agents face other challenges non-park cops don’t. While an FBI investigation can draw from a force of about 35,000 special agents, intelligence analysts, IT experts, and forensic technicians, there are precisely 33 ISB agents covering the entire United States. While frontcountry criminals usually have the courtesy to break the law indoors, the ISB’s crime scenes may be at the bottom of a steep cliff or in the middle of a rushing river. The perennial underfunding of the Park Service means that while FBI agents dress in sharp suits and travel to crime scenes in huge vans stuffed with high-tech equipment, ISB agents often have to lug their not-quite-state-of-the-art gadgetry through the woods on their backs—sometimes at night, in the rain...MORE