Paul Berkowitz is a retired criminal investigator for the National Park Service and an authority on the history and evolution of law enforcement of that agency. Among his several books is The Case of the Indian Trader: Billy Malone and the National Park Service Investigation at Hubbell Trading Post, a well-written and structured exposé of the NPS mishandling of a criminal case that resulted in a grave injustice. In this book Berkowitz writes, “More than a story just about Billy Malone, the Hubbell investigation, and NPS law enforcement, this has been a story about the NPS itself. It has been a story about political influence, incompetence, corruption, and the absence of meaningful safeguards to assure honesty, integrity, accountability in government.”

The story he told in The Case of the Indian Trader was a troubling introduction for me to the serious critique of the NPS to which Berkowitz has dedicated himself since he retired from his career there. U.S. Rangers, The Law of the Land in several editions, preceded The Case of the Indian Trader, and takes a very different approach in the author’s campaign to bring about reform of law enforcement in the NPS and other federal land management agencies.

The crux of Berkowitz’s critique is that these agencies have been derelict throughout their histories in not recognizing the importance of professional law enforcement as a function of their missions, and consequently have not served the American people and agency employees as they should. If protection of the resource, the public who uses it, and the professionals who manage it cannot be enforced, then how is such protection assured?

He exhaustively documents this problem with the history of law enforcement in the NPS in the first 109 pages of U.S. Rangers before moving on to abbreviated treatments of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Berkowoitz makes a compelling case that the NPS has, as a consequence of its culture and resistance to change, muddled through the law enforcement part of its charge for over a century. Readers will no doubt be shocked at some of the decisions made by superintendents and other agency leaders who feared the public perception of an agency that allowed some “rangers” to openly carry guns would be damaged by such action.

Some superintendents, whom Berkowitz contends often know little to nothing about law enforcement, suggested that a ranger’s firearms should be put in desk drawers or vehicle glove boxes, to be retrieved when needed, as though that approach would deter a real threat to the health and even the life of the “ranger.” I put “ranger" in quotation marks here because, as Berkowitz notes, the very definition of “ranger” has been an issue.

Berkowitz describes how throughout its history the NPS has promoted a concept of “national park” to the American people that is, in his opinion based on his experience, divorced from reality.

Toward this end, tales of the hazards and darker side of the parks have over the years been increasingly down-played. Contrary to public and media opinion, the armed ranger is not a new tradition inspired by ever-present and grim necessity. However, in its effort to sell the parks to the public as well as to Congress . . . the National Park Service has traditionally portrayed the lands it administers as pristine and inviting, pure and free of the negative forces we tend to associate with cities and other heavily populated places. Even within the organization, accounts of criminal activities have not been widely shared, and statistics on criminal activity have proven to be unreliable at best.

He argues that national parks are not “pure and free of negative forces” and that is no doubt true as his documentation makes clear. The challenge for the NPS is and has been how to make the parks “inviting” and peaceful, as they mostly are, while at the same time coping with the realities of crime and danger that are sometimes present. Berkowitz provides examples of how intense disagreements have been regarding how to achieve this balancing act.

“Inconsistent” is the word that describes the situation regarding law enforcement in the the NPS, as Berkowitz describes it, and that is not the only realm in which there are inconsistencies between parks over the years, whether it be in interpretation, education, resource protection, or other programmatic elements. Inconsistencies, he argues, are “a direct outcome of the deliberately decentralized manner in which parks were then and continue to be managed under the supervision of a local park manager — a superintendent — who functions with complete autonomy and little if any real accountability.”

The result is that some parks have well-trained and equipped law enforcement rangers given freedom to carry out their duties, and other parks do not. The solution, in his view, would be an NPS law enforcement program of training and application thereof that was accountable to a central law enforcement office within the agency, not to park superintendents. Superintendents understandably have been loath to relinquish oversight of any of their staff to a higher authority. The result has been inconsistency across the system that Berkowitz documents in great detail.

All of this is worth considering, and Berkowitz should be applauded for bringing it up, but the way he does so in U.S. Rangers is not ideal. This book is poorly organized. It is not, as the title suggests, a history of law enforcement but rather a collection of incidents combed from many sources to demonstrate that the process of law enforcement and the need for it have been present for 123 years. After his deeply researched and documented historical critique of law enforcement in the NPS, from page 161 to 752 he presents excerpts from many sources describing incidents that have occurred on federal lands in which officer-involved-shootings and assaults with deadly weapons have occurred. Some of them make for compelling and troubled reading, but nearly 600 pages of examples is overkill. The sheer volume of this book will discourage any but the most interested in the issues from reading it.

As a dedicated student of national park history, I agree withs Berkowitz that the treatment of this dimension of that history has not been given the attention it deserves. His approach in U.S. Rangers is in some ways strengthened by his long experience with the NPS and personal insights into the problem from that experience. On the other hand, it is weakened by a tone of outrage and accusation, the grinding of a personal ax.

In this book he presents only one side of the argument, portraying what he perceives as enemies of law enforcement in the NPS leadership as too “self-absorbed” and resistant to change to take the problem seriously. I leave this book hoping for a more measured and balanced treatment of this important issue.