It’s hard to escape the thought that the police are part of the cycle of violence. At the close of its second episode, Class 57 splices together footage of recruits being hazed and learning hand-to-hand combat with an introduction in what to expect on the job from victims of domestic violence (to begin the seminar, Sergeant Dan asks the recruits how many of them witnessed some kind of abuse growing up, and almost every hand in the room raises). As Dan’s voiceover continues, the sequence concludes with flashes of archival footage from the reservation, photos of U.S. frontier soldiers, the Navajo prison camp at New Mexico’s Fort Sumner, the boarding schools where Navajo children were sent to be split from their culture, and a final still shot of the American flag. It’s a stirring, if clunky visual metaphor: The police are both perpetrators of brutality, the show implies, and victims of it.
But as quickly as this thought appears, the next episode all but abandons it. The documentary does not spend time on the long-standing reasons why the community might be uneasy about law enforcement. In what became known as the Long Walk, over 10,000 Navajo people were forcibly removed from their land in 1864 and held in a prison camp 300 miles away—an attempted ethnic cleansing the U.S. government has not directly acknowledged to this day. A treaty four years later permitted the Navajo to return to a reservation on select portions of their homeland, mostly on sections that were not deemed valuable to American farmers. White settlers soon began complaining about stolen livestock, so in 1872, tribal members founded the Navajo Police Department to diminish tensions. Franklin Sage, director of the Diné Policy Institute, has argued that it was “a way of protecting settlers” and trying to “control and keep the Navajo within a certain area.” Since then, the Navajo Police Department has undergone several iterations, with its powers shrinking and expanding at the federal government’s whim. This history is a crucial window into what caused the community to distrust them, who they’re often policing, how, and why.
The Navajo police have never been fully autonomous. Today, tribal police can detain non-natives on their land, but they still lack jurisdiction to arrest them—that right remains within the sphere of American federal officers. The U.S. government still largely holds the key to funding, land use, and law enforcement on reservations. As such, the Navajo police system is a settler police system: Class 57 hints at this fact, occasionally focusing the camera on the officers’ Thin Blue Line merch. But questions about jurisdiction too largely remain unstated.