STANDING ROCK SIOUX RESERVATION - Daniel Mead, a foot soldier in a surge against crime on Standing Rock, said the reservation is more like Iraq, where he served a year, than any other place he's ever been.

Children, desperate for attention, throng to his police car, like they clustered around the Humvees near Baghdad. Elderly people are grateful for the protection.

"I feel like I'm in the right place at the right time," said Mead, who finished a one-month tour on Standing Rock on Sunday. He's a police officer and a former Marine, on loan from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma.

Mead had a split lip and two broken teeth from running down a teenager Saturday night. The kid tripped and he tripped over him.

"Those kids, man, those kids are what kill me. It's harder than Iraq because it's in America," he said. "I made one little girl, 6 years old, look me in the eye and promise she'd never start drinking."

The surge that Mead is part of is the Bureau of Indian Affairs' "Project Dakota Peacekeeper."

The idea, said BIA deputy director of justice, Pat Ragsdale, was to move in enough police to combat a state of lawlessness on the reservation. There's no money for the operation, so he's piecemealing the estimated $1 million out of other funds, he said.

The surge started in June and was supposed to last three months, but Ragsdale said he's going to scrounge up enough funds to keep it going at least one more, through September.

"The people who are waiting for us to leave will have to wait longer," he said.

Ragsdale said the surge is working.

In two months, the 20 extra officers, working with nine already on the reservation, have made more than 1,000 arrests for juvenile offenses, drugs, crimes against children, and domestic violence and handled more than 6,000 calls for service.

The number of arrests appears to be declining. Ragsdale interprets that to mean the corner's been turned and that by dealing with minor offenses, officers are preventing a trend of escalating offenses.

Tribal Chairman Ron His Horse Is Thunder said he started calling for help this spring, when Cory Long Chase was shot and run over with a car in McLaughlin, S.D.

"Enough is enough," His Horse Is Thunder said. "I asked (the BIA) how many of my people have to die before something gets done." The chairman said there were only five BIA officers when he started his term in 2004.

Standing Rock has, depending on what year and what statistic cited, somewhere in the top 15th highest crime rate among more than 200 reservations with police reporting agencies and nearly six times the national rate for violent crime.

Alcohol, and its damaging effects on families, and lack of employment are main factors, Ragsdale said.

Arnold Schott, mayor of McLaughlin, said Operation Dakota Peacekeeper has turned around his small town, which is part white and part Sioux concentrated in a housing district on the west side.

A command center in a fifth-wheel type of trailer is parked on a gravel lot near the school in McLaughlin. Elmer Four Dance, special BIA agent in charge of the operation, said it was deployed there to serve the South Dakota side of the vast open lands of reservation, which altogether has 2.3 million acres and 10,000 people. The command center has satellite communications on board, and officers come and go in and out of McLaughlin day and night.

"It's been wonderful for the last 60 to 70 days to have law and order here," said Schott, the mayor. "The Indian grandmothers can get their rest at night; otherwise, they were up all night, and so were we."

Break-ins and vandalism are common nightly occurrences in McLaughlin. Schott said he gets out of bed at around 2 a.m. most nights, drives around and finds young kids, 11 and 12 years old, wandering around, stoned, no clue, no parents anywhere.

"There's so much crime here," Schott said.

Ardyce Taken Alive runs a Girls and Boys Club in McLaughlin. She said the surge officers are friendly to the kids, and kids know they're there to protect them.

"There's trust getting built up. I hate to see it lost," she said.

Some of those kids are Channing Swimmer, 16, who was bumming around with his pal, Tyler Fourth, 14, at the weekend powwow and rodeo in Fort Yates.

Swimmer said the officers are keeping trouble away.

"People are driving responsibly and things are cleaner," he said. "I wish they would stay. It makes it more safe."

It's for kids like Swimmer that Roger Gullickson, 31, of Standing Rock, was leaving this week for police academy training. He's a former Marine and now he wants to be an officer on the reservation.

"These are underserved children out here. It's the neglect of the children that really bothers me. It's normal for them to live in a home where there's a party all night, people are passed out in the living room, and mom and dad are yelling at each other," he said.

Gullickson said he sees that the surge has made a difference. He said he sees it because there aren't drunks lying in the street, people aren't reaching out and hassling passersby, drivers aren't blowing through town at high speeds.

Standing Rock, with its amazingly beautiful landscape and so many broken people, is home, and Gullickson said he feels he needs to be there for the long haul.

"These (surge) people will leave and then what? Will what's been suppressed come back stronger?" he asks.

Tribal councilman Joe McNeil said he, too, would like to see the surge, or at least the extra officers, continue the work started with Operation Dakota Peacekeeper.

People are afraid of retaliation if they reported something these past two months, he said. They worry, "Will they break my windows? Will they beat my kids?" he said.

McNeil said the surge was like pulling the covering off a festering wound of cultural poverty that has multiplied for generations.

Ragsdale said no society can arrest its way out of problems, but this operation could be the beginning of better times ahead.

"Without some measure of peace and tranquility, nothing else can happen," Ragsdale said. "You can't build stability around lawlessness."

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at lauren@westriv.com or 888-303-5511.)