All Episodes
Previous Next
June 14, 2019 - Work Worth Doing - Doug Burgum
46:58
Safe and Secure: Hitting the Road With the ND Highway Patrol

Colonel Brandon Solberg, superintendent of the North Dakota Highway Patrol, discusses how troopers keep the state's highways safe and efforts to reduce traffic fatalities, while Trooper Jeremiah Bohn takes Governor Burgum on a ride-along and Trooper Jenna Clawson Huibregtse explains her role as a cultural liaison officer.    

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
With more than 70,000 square miles from corner to corner, North Dakota is among the top states with the most miles of roads per capita.
Keeping people safe while traveling these roads is no small task.
When the North Dakota Highway Patrol hired its first troopers in 1935, there were only five patrolmen charged with covering the entire state.
Just 12 years later, the department rapidly grew to 42 uniformed officers, and over time their focus has shifted from traffic safety to public safety more broadly.
Today, 161 sworn officers of the North Dakota Highway Patrol and more than 40 other team members are dedicated to keeping us safe.
With statewide jurisdiction on all roadways open to the public, troopers are able to work independently and cover a lot of ground.
Every day is unique due to the variety of calls and activities troopers encounter, so today we're setting out to hear directly from the folks who are putting in the miles and learn about the work they do that you may not know about.
Welcome to Work Worth Doing.
I'm Mark Staples.
Today we're talking to three different guests to get a broad understanding of the North Dakota Highway Patrol.
We'll hit the road with Trooper Jeremiah Bone, a Bismarck area highway patrolman, to get a sense of his daily duties.
We'll also hear from Trooper Jenna Klassen-Hubrights, the Cultural Liaison Officer, to understand the importance of this new position.
But first, we're joined by the Superintendent of the North Dakota Highway Patrol, Colonel Brandon Solberg, for an overview of the department.
Colonel Solberg has been with the Highway Patrol for 20 years and was appointed by Governor Burgum to serve as the superintendent about a year ago.
Let's get to it.
Here's Governor Doug Burgum and Colonel Brandon Solberg.
Hey, it's an honor to be here today with Colonel of the North Dakota Highway Patrol, Colonel Brandon Solberg.
Brandon, thanks for joining us today.
Absolutely.
It's good to be here.
1935. It's been a long streak.
This agency has been around since then, and I guess when you think about it, I mean, we've got some agencies that go back to Constitutional 1889 when the state was founded, but I guess there probably weren't a lot of highways to patrol.
Let's just jump into that right away, because core to your mission, and this show we talk about work worth doing, and you and the team of North Dakota's Finest have a chance to save lives every day in the work that you do.
Tell us a little bit personally about you, what drew you to this work, and what part of it's most rewarding for you.
When I think of how I got interested in law enforcement, I don't honestly know where it came from.
I don't have family involved in it.
I don't have friends that were involved in it or friends of family.
So I don't know.
I think it was maybe.
I joke that it was all the times my family would get stopped and I'd see law enforcement in action.
But that's not true either.
I had a pretty good upbringing.
And so I think it was just the desire to help people, you know, like I had an interest in teaching, for example, if this wouldn't have worked out.
So I think it was just that drive and ambition.
And that's what makes the career so rewarding, is you truly do get to help people out.
For example, we do hundreds of motorists assists every year.
And that's kind of, if you've ever had a flat tire, that's a sinking feeling of what am I supposed to do now?
Who do I call?
What show truck?
And if a state trooper can pull up and change a tire and you're in and out of there in five minutes, that's just rewarding to be able to provide a service like that.
Let's just talk a little bit about the scale.
I remind people that North Dakota, we grew up here, we just think, well, our state's a state and this is the size it is, but, you know, wow, we got 161 sworn officers.
So that seems like a big group.
But I remind people that North Dakota is the same size as Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut combined.
71,000 square miles for those six states, 71,000 square miles for the state of North Dakota.
And how many highway miles do we have in the state that you're responsible and your team for patrolling?
Over 107,000 miles of roadway, the highest per capita in the nation, and just state and federal highways over 7,000 miles.
And so that's a lot of territory to cover.
And I agree, if 161 officers were standing in front of us, it would look like that as a big department.
But spread them over that 71,000 square miles, and then add shift rotations, authorized leave into the mix, and pretty soon you can look at a map of who's out working when, and it is pretty light at times.
And one of the things that's emerged in the recent years is, of course, there's drug trafficking that's as part of the national crisis that we're having, sort of resurgence of drug use, whether it's opioids, fentanyl.
We've got other substances that are being transported across North Dakota, and sometimes the highway patrols on the front edge of the Drug interdiction.
When people put on a uniform and pull over a car and you're walking up to a car and it's got out-of-state plates, there is an element of risk in this job.
But talk a little bit about the great work the team's doing on that front.
Our officers in the department have a lot of interest in criminal interdiction and they'd like to see us devote some more resources to it to kind of make it a separate program.
And I'm supportive of trying to move that direction because I've seen how it impacts our surrounding states and the effects that they've had on shipments that would have been passing through North Dakota.
And we know it's here.
A recent story was that a suspect who got stopped in North Dakota made the comment that they chose North Dakota, a route through North Dakota, because they knew their likelihood of getting stopped was very low.
And so that's disappointing to me that in the criminal element, the criminal world, North Dakota is viewed as a safe place to transport narcotics.
And so anything we can do If you think of the impact narcotics have on our communities, like if they're dropping off drugs with fentanyl in them, for example, that's killing our people here in North Dakota.
We don't want that in our communities.
And then drugs in and of themselves, they lead to crime, criminal activity, driving under the influence.
It just has that ripple effect.
Talk a little bit more about Vision Zero and what it means to you and your team.
Vision Zero, the primary purpose for the Highway Patrol now is enforcement and education.
Those are kind of our two pillars.
But the fact is we also have to have that enforcement piece.
That's just got to be a part of what we do out there.
Some people choose to violate the law, even though they know it's not necessarily the right thing to do, and they know that it's dangerous.
And so our presence, that's the focus, high visibility presence on our highways, so that there's just that deterrent effect of, I could get stopped if I choose to violate the law.
And sadly, if you've lived in North Dakota your lifetime, you probably know someone who's died in a car accident or a family member or friend or someone if you're a community, but what's on average, you look back over the last 20 years, how many people die in traffic accidents in North Dakota?
In North Dakota, it seems high to me.
Over 100 people a year are dying.
If you think back over the last decade, 2010, for example, was 105 fatalities.
Two years later, we had our highest over the last decade at 170. And so that quantity to me seems huge.
When I drive around North Dakota, I don't feel like my life is in danger.
Our traffic isn't that heavy.
I've driven in some parts of the country where I truly felt like my life is in danger and a high fatality rate wouldn't necessarily surprise me there.
But for a state like ours, very rural, even in the busier posts like I worked in Fargo, I never felt like my life truly was in danger.
So how are we losing over 100 people a year?
Yeah, because we've got communities that would be like losing an entire community.
It'd be like in three and a half years we've lost the whole town of Arthur, which is a sad way to frame it because Arthur's a great place.
Yeah, that's right.
I know some people there.
I've got some relatives there.
But tell us about how you're trying to get the word out on all of that and what the impact of distracted or impaired driving has on those deaths.
Yeah.
And you mentioned that distracted driving, we do that through education.
Like, that's hard to enforce.
It's hard to catch somebody actually texting while they're near a patrol vehicle.
If you're off duty, you can see it all the time.
But if you're in a patrol vehicle, it's hard to actually catch the violation as it's occurring.
And when you say you can, when you're off duty, that means you're out of uniform, you're in your personal car, you're pulling up at a stoplight, you look to the person next to you and they got their phone up and they're texting.
I mean, could we all see that?
Yes.
That's what you're talking about?
Right.
And anecdotal evidence, others will tell you they see it all the time.
And I know that's the case because I see it when I'm off duty as well.
But when you've got the well-decked-out squad car, people maybe see you and put the phone down?
Everyone behaves.
Yep, if a patrol car is around, I'm the same way.
If I see a patrol car, I start following every rule.
So that's texting.
Talk a little bit about alcohol and what factor that plays and how many crashes in our state are related to that every year.
The rate historically has been 40 to 50 percent as far as number of fatalities resulting from alcohol use, and so that rate is really high.
And last year the number was a little bit lower, but this year it's tracking back again over 40 percent.
And so alcohol really is a big factor.
If I were to name like what's the number one issue as far as crashes, it's a single vehicle rollover, driver not belted, and alcohol involved.
And let's talk about the other part, about not belted, because that seems like the simplest thing in the world to take, you know, whatever the one or two seconds it takes to do that.
I think there has been slight improvement as far as overall seatbelt use, but when we look at our statistics, they're not very good as far as how many people are dying and aren't belted.
Like this year so far, it's 70% of people who have died weren't wearing a seatbelt.
That's a really high percentage and seems like such a simple thing to do.
But now I've confessed this.
I did not start wearing my seatbelt until I went to Minnesota, college in Minnesota, and I knew that it was a primary violation and would cost me $75.
Back in my college days, that was a lot of money.
And so I started putting on my seatbelt.
But growing up in North Dakota, it wasn't part of the culture.
It wasn't ingrained in me to do that.
I think it's different today.
Like when my kids jump in the car, it's no questions asked.
They're wearing their seat belts.
You know, we've got, at least in our large urban areas, we've got some new alternatives with ride-sharing services, Uber and Lyft.
I know that some other parts of the country, big metro areas, where they've actually started to see a decline.
Like in LA, they've started to see a decline in Los Angeles County.
Is there any hope for that for North Dakota?
We've already seen it in use and we've seen some numbers dropping in areas where those ride services are available.
I think that's great.
So I realize in a rural state like ours, it is tough to line up a ride home.
On behalf of the state of North Dakota, share our gratitude to you and all your team and everything that everybody does when they put on that uniform they're representing our state, but they're also having, you know, not just tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of interactions with the public over the course of the year.
And some of those have really literally involved putting their life on the line to help keep the rest of us safe.
And maybe just in wrapping up for our listeners, just share a little bit of the incredible touch points that you and everybody on your team makes during the year.
State troopers themselves, over 150,000 hours of road patrol, so that's going back to the high visibility.
We try to provide that presence on our highways, and that, we hope, has a deterrent effect.
Over 1,100 DUI arrests, over 1,400 drug-related arrests.
Well, so more drug-related than DUIs even?
Yes, that's right.
And some of those may have been multiple charges on one individual but still a large quantity as far as what's happening here in North Dakota with a limited number of officers.
We investigate over 2,000 crashes and a lot of times we provide a supplemental service to local agencies like if it's a serious crash We'll come in and handle that.
Some agencies can take care of it and have their own reconstructionists, but that is one of our primary services we provide, is the ability to come in and thoroughly investigate a crash and try to put the pieces together.
We handled over 6,900 motorists, assists, and abandoned vehicles, and that's what we get our most thank you letters from.
People see us out there assisting motorists who truly are stranded.
You'd think today With vehicle technology, there wouldn't be as many breakdowns, but they are still occurring.
People still are running out of gasoline and things like that, and they need our help at times.
And then we've responded to 14,000 calls for service, and so over a year, that's a lot of calls.
And assisted other government agencies, that's like local law enforcement, 3,000 calls.
That averages about Eight calls a day that our officers would be helping another agency, and so that's outside of our kind of core mission of what we would be doing out here.
Those calls for service are answered by people like Trooper Jeremiah Bone and his 160 colleagues in the Highway Patrol.
Trooper Bowen spent nearly eight years in the United States Marine Corps, where he was a logistics clerk, a member of a software development team, an embassy guard in Tanzania and Finland, and a platoon sergeant at an air wing squadron in North Carolina.
He now serves the people of North Dakota as a trooper in the Highway Patrol.
Since joining the team in 2007, he has held roles as a member of the department's honor guard, emergency response team, and an infrared camera operator on the department's aircraft.
As a trooper patrolling the southwest region of our state, it's not uncommon for Trooper Bone to cover 300 miles in a day.
With those miles comes a lot of experience and a lot of stories.
There's no better way to understand the job than to hop in the car and hit the road.
So that's what we did.
Quick warning before we get started on the ride-along.
Due to the nature of Trooper Bowen's service as a Marine and a law enforcement officer, some of the scenarios discussed in this segment are more graphic than topics we've covered in previous episodes.
All right, well, we'll try and bring him back in one piece.
A couple of high-speed chases, drug interdiction, biggest bust of the year happened during a ride-along.
That's what I'm worried about.
I was telling them earlier, when I first got the job, I had so many stories I'd come home and tell my wife.
She's like, you wouldn't believe the stuff we saw today, but now after doing this 13 years, I had two guys want to fight me last week for DUIs.
She goes, how was your day on?
It's not even a different thing anymore.
So Trooper Bowen, thank you for your service, not only the US Marines, but North Dakota Highway Patrol.
One of the things that we talk about on this show is about work worth doing.
This is a dangerous job.
You're out serving the public in North Dakota.
Thank you for that.
But what what helps you get going every day and what makes it interesting?
Thank you, sir.
It's one of the best things, I think, is it's different every day and it's not boring.
You're not sitting behind a desk.
Our desk is our car, and it depends on what you want to do every day.
It can be write tickets, or you could do a safety talk, or talk to an organization, or whatever.
So there's a lot of variety in what we do.
So you're saying you've got one of the fastest desks in the state right here?
Probably.
This one's armored, too.
We like that.
Thank you for offering to let me go for a ride-along.
Should we head out?
Sure, you sure can.
And what are some of the other features of the car other than you've got multiple pairs of handcuffs right here?
Lots of handcuffs.
All of our radios that we have, they don't talk to the towers or other radios.
They talk to our car, and our car retransmits to the tower.
And what kind of engine do you have?
This is a 6.2 liter.
So this will go fast.
It can probably go up to about 160. It'll get up and move.
The charger I had before this was not armored, so it got up to speed real quick.
This one will still get up to speed, just takes a little longer to do it.
But I like it because it's stable at high speeds.
- Yep. - Where some of the other ones, they thin at about 130, they start to wobble a little bit and kind of hard to control. - So tell me a little bit about your career within North Dakota Highway Patrol, where you're stationed and all the different locations you've been in.
Yes, I've been, I guess, lucky enough to be stationed in Bismarck right out of the Academy.
I joined the Highway Patrol in January of 2007, so I've been here almost my, well, actually my entire career.
And I think we kind of like it here, my family and I, so we kind of decided to stick around.
On a typical day, how many hours, how many miles would you put on?
A 10-hour shift, if we're just doing enforcement, patrolling, probably about 300 miles in a day.
Sometimes we'll do moving enforcement, sometimes we'll do stationary patrol.
We do a lot of other things like court preparations, investigate crashes, and stuff like that too, so it kind of cuts back on the miles.
But a clean day that nothing's distracting, probably about 300 miles.
So what's the hardest part of your job and what's the most fun part of the job?
They're probably the same thing.
It's the unexpected.
The hardest part is you can go from sitting on the road and kind of getting bored to running as fast as you can to a crash.
It could be a lot of weird things involved.
You never know what you're gonna get until you get there.
And all the scenarios that play through your mind, in route, usually none of them are what's gonna be there when you get on the ground.
And how many years have you been with Highway Patrol?
About 13 years.
And prior to that, U.S. Marine Corps, thank you for your service for that.
Thank you.
And you had a chance to serve overseas, protecting presidents, secretaries of state, and guarding embassies.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
I was...
I was stationed right away at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, out of Embassy Guard School.
It was a special billet that the Marine Corps has that you have to qualify.
Only 25% of the people who apply get accepted, and then of those, 25% of the people make it through.
You get a top-secret security clearance and quite a bit of other stuff that we had to do.
Well, Embassy security is a very elite detail, so congratulations.
Thank you.
On that, I know they took it up to another whole other level after what happened with the Iranian embassy back in 1980. Yes, sir.
But that responsibility remained with the Marines, and you were there, and then you happened to be there during the time of a terrorist attack.
I was.
The five of us that was in my detachment were the only five American military people in the entire country.
We were attacked by Bin Laden's crew, Al Qaeda, in 1998 in August.
They blew up our embassy and then the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.
I was stationed at that embassy at the time.
I was put in charge of security for our interim embassy and all the embassy employees.
Most of my team stayed back with...
So you're on duty at the time of the attack?
I wasn't.
I was scheduled to work the next shift.
When the attack happened, I was...
Kind of laying on the couch of our marine house.
And I woke up in the middle of the night, went to bed, and about two hours after I got up to go to bed, the bomb happened, and the window above the couch I was laying on came out of the frame and sliced the couch in half, went through the couch that I was laying on.
Wow.
And we thought that our detachment commander was messing with us because he found a bunch of expired flashbangs, explosives, in the safe.
Yep.
And he was the kind of guy to use those in a training exercise, so we were mostly aggravated with him.
And when we looked out the window and saw the smoke coming from the embassy and parts of, like, car parts landing in our yard, we responded.
And the primary entrance to the embassy was destroyed, and both our secondary and backup entrances were destroyed.
So we had to jump over fences for other embassies.
I remember jumping over the Omani embassies fence to come in, and as we were coming in, cars were burning and exploding.
We thought we were taking fire from RPGs because it was a hiss and an explosion.
So we thought we were taking fire, so we kind of got in the embassy.
Our gear was all stored at the embassy.
We got our gear on and then secured the scene and evacuated as many people as we could and then started burning and classified.
We were up for, I think, 48 hours straight without sleep for a while.
Injuries, fatalities?
Yeah, one guy, we saw one guy when we jumped the fence and he was laying on the ground and when we got our gear on, we came back and we noticed that he wasn't where we thought he was and he was moving.
So I picked him up.
Myself and State Department personnel picked him up on a cot.
As we carried him back to where our doctor was, he was praying.
He sang his prayers in Arabic.
He was Muslim.
And he was praying louder and louder, and as soon as we set him down by the doctors, he passed away.
So that guy passed away.
Another gal who was teaching me Swahili, she got the full brunt of the blast.
She died.
A lot of locals, no Americans died in our embassy, but several died in Kenya.
After that, you were deployed to Finland?
Yes.
We did a lot of stuff in Africa, so anytime one embassy needed help or something crazy happened, we'd leave where we go.
I've been to several countries there, but Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came and did an opening of the new embassy and gave some awards, and she told us Marines, anywhere you wanted to go in the world, you could go.
Coming out of the military, we've got positions open for North Dakota Highway Patrol right now.
What would you say to anybody out there that's thinking about a career in law enforcement or thinking about joining North Dakota Highway Patrol?
I did not want to be a police officer coming out of college.
I went to college to get a job.
I had a letter of recommendation from Madeline Albright to join the Diplomatic Security Service, and I had an application in.
The federal government takes a long time.
And they're doing their backgrounds and I did the interviews and passed all that.
Student loans started coming to you and I didn't have a source of income.
And my brother is a police officer in West Fargo.
And he said, well, the Highway Patrol's hired me.
Why don't you do that and pay some student loans until something else comes available?
Well, the Highway Patrol hired me and I was at the academy.
And the State Department called me back and wanted me to come work for them.
And I told them I think I'm good.
I lived in many different states in the country.
I lived in many different countries.
And North Dakota is probably the best place on the planet that I can think of to raise a family.
And also, you've got a lot to look forward to in North Dakota, especially with the seasons that we have.
I always tell my family, if you live in California, the only thing you have to look forward to is 78 degrees and sunny.
In North Dakota, all winter long, you're like, I can't wait until summer.
And summer finally hits, you're excited.
And then halfway through summer, you're like, I can't wait until winter.
It's so darn hot.
So you've always got something to look forward to.
Of course, one of the missions of the Highway Patrol is safety, and talking to other officers, other troopers, one of the hardest parts of the job is when you get called upon a crash scene and find someone that may have been speeding, may have been drinking, may have been distracted driving, may not have been wearing their seatbelt, and you've got to deal with a fatality.
Tell us a little bit about that.
That's actually a good question, because I grew up, my dad farmed, and I learned to drive a grain truck when I was about 10 years old.
And I didn't know how to work the clutch, I was too small to work it, so I basically just drove it on the starter until it fired up and just hit the gas.
But we never wore seat belts on the farm.
And all through growing up, seat belts were not a thing.
When I joined the Marines, my base I went to was a high security base.
So as you would come in the gate, they'd either wave you in, but if you didn't have your seatbelt on, they pulled you over and they brought you a ticket.
And that muscle memory wasn't there for me.
I received a lot of tickets from the Marines from now having my seatbelt on.
Wasn't a really big believer in them.
Well, my very first crash when I got this job coming out of the academy, I got called to a crash down in Standing Rock.
Five people were involved in the crash.
When I got down there, alcohol was involved.
The vehicle had very bald tires, driving on a winding road, too high of a speed.
The vehicle rolled.
There were four males.
I don't want to say males because there were young men and young women in there.
There were four men in the vehicle and one female.
The female was in the back seat between two of the men.
And when the vehicle rolled, all four men were ejected from the vehicle.
And the female was being bounced around, the two men, and she shattered her pelvis and some bones.
Pretty bad.
And she ended up crawling out of that vehicle and walking two miles to call for help.
When I arrived on scene, one of the men had a fence post through his chest, and another one was underneath the vehicle.
And this is, like I say, one of my very first crashes.
So it was kind of eye-opening to me, especially when they flipped the car over.
And there was barely any damage to the inside of that car.
I mean, none.
There was plenty of room for everybody in that car to survive if they would have had their seatbelts on.
But everybody just got squirted out of the car as it rolled very violently.
And to kind of put the icing on that cake, I guess...
You see a lot of other crashes where you show up and you're like, there's no way in the world that somebody survived that crash.
The car is completely mangled, but they're designing these cars these days that things will crumple away from the passenger compartment.
Remember a crash just towards the end of winter where an eight-month pregnant lady ran into a school bus, and we thought the worst.
By the time we separated the bus from the car and cut her out, she was completely fine, barely a scratch on her.
Wow.
So, you see some really bad cars, and people are surviving them, and you're seeing some cars with barely any damage, and they're dying because of no seatbelts.
So now, I mean, that drove it home for me.
Seatbelt is, like, automatic for me now.
I don't even think about it.
But in the Marines, I got a lot of tickets and got a lot of talking to's by my commanders.
But you've seen with your own eyes, and you're a believer now.
Yes, absolutely.
Seatbelts save lives?
Yes.
As part of your job you get to work on I-94 and nationwide we've got a lot of drug trafficking going on and a lot of it that's coming across here.
Tell us a little bit about that part of your job and what it's like when you pull somebody over out of state plates and you may suspect that there's illegal activity going on.
Yeah, when we do criminal addiction, it's not necessarily just narcotics.
It's human trafficking and it's all kinds of different things that we're seeing.
We focus more on drugs that are coming to North Dakota.
We've seen a lot more of that lately.
Especially, one of our biggest drugs that we find is, it had been marijuana, but one of the harder drugs that we see a lot of is meth.
But when you stop a car like that and you have two people that say they're brother and sister but don't know each other's names, it's usually a good clue to, you know, ask more questions, get deeper involved.
Yeah, there's a lot of tactics.
I mean, I could speak all day about how...
Like a 107 I-94 West Town, no injuries.
That fender bender you're talking about?
Yeah, they're just broadcasting it.
So when it comes to criminal interdiction, there's so many different tactics and techniques they use, but predominantly for us, we see the drugs traveling east.
And it used to be cash going west, but there's a lot more electronic money transfers and stuff like that now.
but we used to see a lot more cash, but the drugs usually are heading east, Chicago, Minneapolis.
So now we're out on the 994. If you're out here by yourself, what are you looking for?
What are you looking for?
Violations?
You're looking for license plates?
You're looking for what kind of things are on your mind?
Well, the first thing that will catch our eye is dangerous driving.
Swerving in and out of traffic, excessive speed.
We'll also look at vehicle violations too, like excessive tint, expired registration.
One of my pet peeves is turn signals, because not only is it the law, it's also polite to do that as well.
One of the things we do a lot of safety talks at schools.
Yep.
A lot of kids, of course, they always ask, how fast do you go?
Like me, like my third question.
It was, but they think it's more of a routine.
Why do you need to go that fast?
A vehicle's doing 160. And I always explain to them that if we're doing 75 miles per hour one direction and the other car's doing 90 the opposite direction, that's a 165 mile per hour distance gap that's growing in between you.
And depending on how long it takes you to turn around, You know, it's going to take you a while to catch up.
Yep.
I've had slower patrol cars before, and there's been times where I turn around on a car and it took me 10 miles to catch up to.
Yes.
So it's good to have a car that I can actually get up on them.
It's safer that way, too, so you're not losing anybody.
So this is our camera that we have at forward facing and this is our radar antenna.
Another camera in the back and there's another radar antenna back there.
But the radar, there's a counting unit underneath my seat and it displays right here.
On the radar, are you able to exactly which car it is when people are bunched up like this?
It'll show the strongest radar signal, and then it will show on the other window where it says fast, it'll show the fastest one in the entire radar beam.
So if you see somebody that's passing everybody down the road, It'll probably pick up a truck first.
See, they're the strongest one.
And somebody over here is doing 57. So you have to see the fastest one that's doing it.
Now you have to tell the radar whether to go oncoming or opposing lanes so you're not clocking.
It helps you discriminate a little bit.
This radar can clock four vehicles at the same time.
two out of the front, two out of the rear.
And situations like this, when they're bunched up like this, it's really dangerous to cross the median and get in there because there's so much traffic.
You almost have to get them inside.
Tell me about the camera.
I mean, the highway patrolman, you're usually out there by yourself and pull somebody over and the camera's recording that.
Yes, sir.
It automatically comes on as soon as we turn our lights on.
It'll record 30 seconds back from when you activated your lights.
It'll record if you're in a crash.
We can activate it manually as well.
We have a remote in our pocket that we can turn it on with or flip a switch.
It records everything forward.
We hit a button and we can record the back seats as well.
But it's always recording audio.
We have a microphone on our person and there's one in the car as well.
So if you're approaching a vehicle, you've had your lights on, it's been recording, and then it'll record you walking up and all that interaction.
I imagine having that record is critical to the other end of law enforcement, which is actually closing the deal on...
On the enforcement end of it, when you get into the legal system.
Yes.
There was a lot of resistance when they first came out.
Some of the senior troopers thought there was going to be Big Brother watching.
You know, everything is...
They were really apprehensive about it.
Those cameras have saved more careers of people calling and complaining about something that didn't happen.
And it also is very helpful in court.
I was hoping to find somebody right here.
This is deep in the 60 zone.
So we've just driven through the medium.
We've got a potential speeder.
Now I'm pulling in behind.
The lights are coming on.
And he's braking and pulling over he or she.
And he's going to be the same.
sir.
I'm making sure that the traffic gets over before I get out of the car so we don't get...
And then do you do anything looking up license plates or anything before you go up, or do you go have a visit first?
I go visit them first.
- Okay, all right. - How you doing, ma'am?
For obvious reasons, we won't be playing the audio of their conversation.
But as Trooper Bone is standing on the side of the highway talking to the driver, a car drives past in the right lane just a few feet away from him.
By law, people are supposed to pull into the far lane, right?
And then some of them just zip right by you when you're standing there?
They do.
He tells the governor that it was a minor speeding violation and the driver acknowledged her mistake in accelerating too soon.
So she didn't realize how fast she was going at the time.
I told her she was going to write a warning for her CV first.
Although there's nothing new about a member of the Highway Patrol pulling over a motorist for speeding, there have been a lot of upgrades to the technology that supports their work.
In addition to the radar that tracks vehicle speed, there are cameras and microphones that automatically begin recording during a traffic stop, which helps protect troopers and motorists.
And since troopers often work in sparsely populated areas of the state, there is a computer program that instructs dispatch officers to contact troopers and check in a few minutes after a stop is initiated.
Being a highway patrolman is a dangerous job that is essential for the safety of our citizens, and the state is working to make sure these troopers are well equipped to carry out their mission.
But as Colonel Solberg mentioned earlier, traffic safety doesn't capture the full spectrum of what the highway patrol does.
As a statewide law enforcement agency, they play an essential role in fostering relationships with local police departments, county sheriff's offices, and federal agencies.
This is long-standing practice for the Highway Patrol, but a relatively new position has placed a renewed emphasis on the importance of partnerships.
Jenna Klassen-Hubrights, or Trooper Jenna as many of us call her, is the Highway Patrol's Cultural Liaison Officer.
Trooper Klassen-Hubrights has a Master's in Cultural Anthropology from North Dakota State University.
Her job connects her to a wide variety of communities in our state, working to make sure the Highway Patrol maintains strong relationships with every citizen of every background.
Trooper Hubrights, it feels very formal to call you that because I've known you as Jenna working around the Capitol and very excited to have you be the very first person to take on this new role at the Cultural Liaison Office and you did it at a time when that was really essential for the state of North Dakota.
We had a number of things going on with the Tribal-related topics, issues, opportunities, and challenges, and you've jumped right into that.
But tell us a little bit about the role and tell us about the environment you entered and where you're trying to go with this.
Yes.
Well, it's been a pleasure to be able to be the person who starts this program for the Highway Patrol.
I did come into it at kind of a tumultuous time for our state and our department and the community's Within North Dakota.
It's the reason I got into law enforcement.
I entered law enforcement with the idea to get my bearings as a cop and then try and get this program started.
And so when all this happened in our state, it was just such an opportunity to listen and learn and collaborate with those around me.
There was a lot of things highlighted during the protests that I saw that we needed to work on.
As a state and an agency and community.
So it was a good springboard from there.
And when you're talking about protests, of course, that's all the things related to Dakota Access Pipeline protests, which probably highlighted that there were some opportunities for stronger connections and understanding between people across North Dakota.
And you've jumped into that.
And tell us a little bit about what you've learned so far and what are the goals of the program?
Absolutely.
So when we started the program, we just kind of put some guiding principles on the counter with the help of the Indian Affairs Commission.
And then we kind of just let the needs of the community and the people set what the program was going to do for the state of North Dakota and for people.
So we kind of took people's needs assessment as they approached us about the program and as I went out and met and listened.
And it's really turned into such a wonderful program.
I might be a little biased in saying that, but we've been able to make so many new relationships.
Our communication lines are so much better than I would say they were before the protest.
And also there's just been so many good relationships formed because of this program.
It started with just listening and we've turned it into tons of collaboration.
And we're still learning every single day and building new stuff.
Well, and for our listeners today, you know, maybe we should just provide a little context on the complexity because, of course, we've got our five tribal nations with which we share borders.
They've got independently elected tribal chairmen and chairwomen.
and they've got independently elected councilmen and women.
Some of those have got tribal police.
There's federal law enforcement that's active on those tribal.
tribal lands through the BIA.
And then intersecting all those layers, all of the tribal members are also North Dakota citizens and we've got North Dakota state highways which intersect.
And then we have counties, which intersect our tribal lands.
Counties have elected sheriffs and elected sheriff patrols.
And I know we've got, I think, MHA, for example, a large reservation touches five counties.
And so you had five separate elected sheriffs, and you're sorting through all these layers of complexity to try to achieve some memorandums of understanding about when a certain incident happens at a certain location, who's got jurisdictional authority, who gets to respond when a citizen of North Dakota calls 911. You know, what's our answer when they call?
And so this is a really complex problem, and I know you've been digging into it hard, but tell us how it's all coming along.
Absolutely.
So I would say for probably the last year and a half, we've been talking about what these jurisdictional agreements can look like with tribal leaders and with leaders within the Highway Patrol.
And then the Indian Affairs Commission and myself.
So we talk about all of the layers of people who are involved in an agreement like this, all the elected officials.
We want to make sure we're respecting everybody's part in that.
And so these agreements will be able to do so much for the people of North Dakota.
For example, when you're talking about enrolled and non-enrolled members on Tribal Nation, When somebody calls 911, we want to make sure the closest law enforcement officer is responding.
But we also want to make sure the correct one is responding.
And so we ran into this problem with people being asked if they were enrolled or not.
And so through these agreements and through We have radio agreements that are separate from jurisdictional agreements where cops can just talk to each other.
We're able to kind of solve that problem so we can just respond and assist people right away.
But with these jurisdictional agreements comes a lot of history and so we want to make sure that we're respecting that as well.
So much more work to do between all these law enforcement agencies and the Highway Patrol.
Just MHA alone, I think we counted at least 11 law enforcement agencies that operate within those boundaries.
And then also the Highway Patrol, too.
So these jurisdictional agreements will do a lot for not only the people of North Dakota, but also law enforcement and providing a quality service to them.
Well, it's a really important work you're working on and for the safety of citizens of every North Dakotan, regardless of which county or what part of the state or whether they're on or off reservation, tribal, non-tribal.
We're here, the highway patrols, to serve everybody.
They're all citizens of the state.
So thank you so much for all the work that you're doing to try to dig into this very complex, challenging issue, which has never really been tackled before.
And I know that you're doing this in conjunction with a lot of teammates and partners that are helping Yeah, absolutely.
So when I explain my position to people who maybe haven't heard of this position before, or even just other law enforcement, they think cultural Awareness and diversity, and people often think they need to look across the globe for that, when here in North Dakota we have so much of that.
And so when I look across the state, I see tribal nations work intensely with them, but we also have so many other ethnicities represented within our state, namely in places like Fargo and Grand Forks.
We've had cultural liaison officers through the Fargo PD and Grand Forks PD for almost a decade now.
Luckily, they've taken me under their wing when I was new, and they still do to this day, to meet those communities, to learn about them.
And so one of the other main things that my program, the highway patrol program, does is recruitment.
We need an agency that represents what our state is for population.
Currently the Highway Patrol does not match that, and so with especially communities in Fargo and Grand Forks and Tribal Nations is trying to recruit heavily out of those communities, teach people about law enforcement, Highway Patrol, and why it's a good place to work.
So if someone's got an interest and we absolutely positively have got positions open and we're recruiting, the door is open, but if someone is interested, who should they contact?
There's a lot of ways they can get a hold of us.
They can get a hold of me directly, just a simple Google search to the Highway Patrol.
Trooper Jenna is an easy way for them to locate me.
There's only six women in the Highway Patrol sworn, so we're easy to track down.
We have a Facebook page, Instagram, Twitter, all sorts of ways to get into contact with us.
If you happen to drive past a Highway Patrol office, you can always stop in the front window there and speak to the person at the window.
We'd all be happy to help give more information and recruit into the Highway Patrol.
So it sounds like we need more female applicants as well.
Yes, we also need more of those.
Great.
Trooper Jenna, I know you love your work.
You're very passionate about it.
On this show, we talk about work worth doing, but maybe just share with listeners what drew you into this field and what gets you excited every day about the work you're doing.
Absolutely.
I grew up on a farm and ranch and I feel like my work ethic came from there, but my parents always instilled in us a public service mindset to listen and learn and then make sure you put yourself in a position to collaborate and help.
And as I got older, I saw the opportunity in that through public service of sorts.
I didn't ever think law enforcement would be that for me, but I kind of happened into it like Colonel Solberg had said in his own situation.
And luckily I was able to pair my passion for public service into law enforcement and then also cultural awareness.
Great.
Well, thank you.
And I should maybe toss in a thanks to your parents, too, for getting you set on the right path because we're really, really pleased to have you part of North Dakota's Finest and also defining this very important role as the cultural liaison officer for the North Dakota Highway Patrol.
So thank you, Trooper Jenna.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
The Highway Patrol has several openings right now.
You can learn more at nd.gov slash ndhp Working with the Highway Patrol offers a variety of specialties including crash reconstruction, canine units, the aviation program, search and rescue, and more.
The Highway Patrol also operates the Law Enforcement Training Academy in Bismarck, where state and local officers come to train.
These days, Trooper Jenna has the opportunity to teach a course to every student who comes to the academy on how we can improve our cultural understanding and continue to build relationships.
Through efforts like this, we can all work together to make North Dakota a safer, better place to live.
That's all for today's show.
Thanks to the Highway Patrol for giving us a closer look at their work, especially Trooper Bone, Trooper Klaassen-Hubrights, and Colonel Solberg.
Thanks as well to our audio producer, Alicia Jolliff.
▲
Export Selection