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Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Navajo police force is the only sovereign indigenous force in the nation that has its own academy, and it is a proud symbol of people protecting each other and their culture. It's also in danger. staffing shortages, a sprawling rural territory, and increase in violence around the nation constantly challenge the force that doesn't have enough officers or resources. A new documentary followed one recruiting class at the Navajo Police Academy during the pandemic. It shows how high the stakes are and captures the effort to educate and retain as many recruits as possible even though it is a gruelling process.

We see firsthand just how hard it is to make it through the academy and the consequences as slowly more and more recruits drop out. The question is how many will make it through, and what dangers will they face once they graduate and begin to serve? Navajo Police: Class 57 is premiering on HBO on October 17th and will also stream on Max. With us now are the doc's three co-directors Kahlil Hudson. Hi, Kahlil.

Kahlil Hudson: Hi, there. Nice to be here.

Alison Stewart: Alex Jablonski. Alex, nice to meet you.

Alex Jablonski: Hello, likewise.

Alison Stewart: And David Nordstrom. Hi, David.

David Nordstrom: Hello. Hi.

Alison Stewart: Kahlil, the Navajo police force is the only, as I said, only sovereign indigenous police force in the nation with an academy. It's a source of pride for the force and for the people who are recruits. What's the history of the police force briefly? How was it first created?

Kahlil Hudson: We focus on the police training academy. The title of the show, Class 57, speaks to the fact that this is the 57th class going through the academy. Prior to our class, there had been a bit of a hiatus where the police cadets had been trained in the state academy which is not trained by Navajo's Arizona State Police Training Academy. The incoming police chief made it part of his mandate coming in to reinstate this police training academy. There had been close to a 10-year hiatus from the Navajo Nation training its own. The police force itself goes back to years and years, decades and decades.

Alison Stewart: David, as you jump in here, a few of the officers make reference to the story of the twin warriors, an important piece of history. How does the symbol of the twin warriors relate to the Navajo police force?

David Nordstrom: The twin warriors mythology centers around the holy sons of the Navajo son god who protected the land. They were the avatars of protecting and serving the people. The modern Navajo police department uses that mythology as a reference point. They have a huge cultural resonance beyond policing. It means something very special to the police force, and in particular, the academy. Their name and that whole mythology is invoked throughout the training, and especially at graduation.

Alison Stewart: Alex, as I alluded to, I'm going to ask you to tell us a little bit more, why are they having such a difficult time recruiting [crosstalk]?

Alex Jablonski: What makes the force unique is what also makes recruiting a challenge, which is that this is an area where we're seeing a long-oppressed minority choose to police itself in an act of autonomy and survival. What that means is that they are drawing from the Navajo reservation. The biggest issue is that they have a hard time just getting people to stay a lot of times because there are limited opportunities.

On the nation, you have folks who if they're going to go to college, they're going to go off the reservation or they might go into the military, but if they're motivated, they might leave, and so you don't have a big pool of young people to draw from. Then on top of that, there's this issue of background checks where even if you have a misdemeanor from when you're 18 years old, that can rule you out. You have folks who have just very minor misdemeanors here and there, and all of a sudden they're ineligible to work for the police department. That also created its own recruiting challenges.

Alison Stewart: Kahlil, the attrition rate is really high, and that's one of the things they're trying to-- In the film you see the instructor saying, "We got to get this attrition rate down." It's difficult as the film goes on and it becomes more nuanced and you understand what the recruits are up against. What is really within the control of the officers and the instructors to lower that rate when so many of the issues seem systemic?

Kahlil Hudson: It's many fold. There are those cadets, those recruits that choose to leave, whether that's-- The program is quite rigorous. They adhere to the state standards, there's physical fitness, regular testing, which is quite robust and difficult. The training is just grueling. Every day at the end of the day, they go in for an hour, hour-and-a-half of PT. There's the physical challenge of it, there's the mental challenge of it. It's a 6 months program that then is followed by 14 weeks out in the field. You have cadets that have a difficult time being away from their families. Quite a few of the recruits have children, often young children at home that they're away from for an entire week. They typically will go home on the weekends. There's the physical aspect to it. There's the mental aspect to it. Then quite simply, some of them don't meet the physical standards.

Alison Stewart: David, how did you get such intimate access to some of these folks? You're in their homes, you're meeting their children. You're also with some of these cadets, you're in their bunks at night. The cameras are there when they're throwing up or having panic attacks after events. How did you get such close access?

David Nordstrom: I really have to credit that to my partners here, Alex and Kahlil. They originated this project on their own before bringing me on. It was really the result of a very long and careful dance that they did with the Navajo police department. They just, from a very early date, I think it was in development, when you get right down to it almost three years, they really had to go in there and earn their trust and prove themselves and their intentions, and just build the relationships not only within the police department, which is a pretty high bar to clear, but the community itself, especially when you're going to be following young cadets home to their homes.

I would say, culturally, the Navajo culture is somewhat very private. It's a barrier you have to break. Kahlil, maybe you can speak to this. You'd worked on the reservation before doing some other film projects and so you had some experience there and some contacts. It was really just a very slow careful courting process where they made really lasting relationships with the people involved.

Alison Stewart: Kahlil, I want you to jump in.

Kahlil Hudson: As Dave said, culturally-- and like Dave said, I've spent a fair amount of time out here. We're actually out here now in Window Rock doing the interview. I've done a few other projects out here, and Navajos, culturally tend to like to sit back and observe whatever it is that they're doing, and make an assessment and then weigh in or connect. Like they said, it was quite a long process making personal connections with the recruits and having one-on-one conversations over a period of time, and just making sure that they trusted us and understood what we were going for. We weren't going for something like cops. We're doing something much more nuanced and personal and intimate. I think once they figured out and trusted what we were trying to accomplish, they were on board.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about a three-part documentary series, Navajo Police: Class 57, which is premiering on HBO on October 17th, and will be also available to stream on Max. Alex, we spend a lot of time with the recruits, some of whom are really, really young, but we also spend a lot of time with the instructors and the officers who are super tough on their recruits, and they explain why they have to be tough. They're going to find themselves in situations, life-and-death situations.

You do get a sense that some of the instructors are genuinely sad when a recruit drops out or just does something really dumb. I won't give it away, but lies again about something really stupid. What sort of insight did you get to how invested the instructors are and the officer are versus them having to do their job and weed out people who aren't going to make it?

Alex Jablonski: One thing, too, I think that we should talk about just real quickly is the nature of policing on the Navajo Nation, because I think that to understand why the training is so grueling, the officers patrol solo, meaning they're not with a partner, and because of the topography of the Navajo Nation, oftentimes they get cut off from radio service and even self-service.

The result is that you can be responding to a domestic violence call or even a weapons call on your own where your backup is an hour away. That means that your interpersonal skills, your self-defense skills, all of that need to be extremely sharp or you could potentially be in a lot of trouble. Because of that, I think that the instructors feel an immense pressure and responsibility to the folks that they're training to make sure that they're going to be safe once they go out on the road.

They have this own internal pressure within themselves that they feel this responsibility for the cadet's future. On top of that, there is a institutional pressure, which is that they know the police department needs more officers. They know that for every officer that they can get through the academy, that's another officer who can retire or is going to have backup available, et cetera.

Then there's no way that you go through something this difficult without developing personal relationships with folks in the sense of, you learn to respect them, you learn to trust them, you learn how to push their buttons, they know how to push yours, and it really has, and I think, in part, because of everyone being Navajo, it has this real bonding result. You can be with someone for, like we see, 16, 18, 20 weeks, you think they're going to make it and they do something so dumb that you can't believe it. It's the disappointment I think a parent would feel in a child almost.

Alison Stewart: There's also this really interesting, and it's not even a subtext, it's very clear there are American flags waking outside of the academy. Of course, there are conversations about explicitly how the US and government has-- what it has done to make things so difficult on indigenous people of starting with taking land. As you were making the film, Kahlil, and you were thinking about how to have and introduce these other themes, the themes of the history between indigenous people and the US government, what were some of the issues you knew you wanted to address in the series?

Kahlil Hudson: Sure. The idea for the show all sprung from trying to explore the idea around tribal sovereignty, which is the concept that indigenous tribes have an authority to govern themselves within the border of the United States. When you drive onto the Navajo Nation, it does feel a little bit like you're entering another country, because it sort of is, at least in concept, and certainly, culturally.

For starters, that's something that we were interested in exploring. We didn't want to be too on the nose with any of this stuff. We didn't want to be too polarizing or get too political with what we were presenting. The ideas that are in there are subtly inferred without being too explicit. We wanted people of all political walks of life to be able to get something out of this show and maybe learn a little bit, and come in through the back door with some of these ideas.

One of the ideas, certainly, is this idea that policing is a bit of a colonial construct. That this is something that the Western world has brought in, and it's something that's, out of necessity, had to be adopted by tribes. Certainly, there were warriors that would protect the tribe back in the old days, but nothing like the institution that is as a police department. There's a little bit of an ironic element to the fact that tribes have had, out of necessity, had to adopt this western construct of police department.

Back the tribal ways of doing things, if you committed a crime in the tribe, you were just ostracized. Depending on where you were in the United States, a tribe, certainly, like in Alaska where I'm from, if you committed a crime and you were ostracized from the tribe, you would only last a few days out on your own. You had to live as a tribe. This idea that there's a police force that is catching criminals and punishing wrongdoers was something that we had certainly talked about. Again, we're not being overt with any of this stuff. We're just presenting this idea that this is a western concept that's being brought in.

Alison Stewart: Alex, there's this push-pull for a lot of these young officers and these young cadets because some parts of people in their family don't like cops, back to the point that Kahlil was making. There's a really sad scene where one of the cadets is trying to celebrate making it through the academy, and a family member is like, "You're a cop now, man," and is really giving him a hard time. What did you observe about this dynamic, and how did the cadets talk about why they wanted to be officers?

Alex Jablonski: I think that the cadets' motivations were really pure. It was out of a desire to serve their community in a way that they felt would allow them to stay on the reservation and to really make an impact. What you see in the series is that this is community policing in just its realist, rawest form. You see officers responding to calls that involve family members. We were on ride-alongs where that happened, obviously.

It becomes a very different experience for them, and I think that was some of the things that the officers were balancing, which is like, "Oh, I might actually have to go and arrest or transport my uncle." I think in some ways, it's actually really good because it makes them treat everyone that they come into contact with as a relative, which is one of the core tenets of Navajo culture, this idea of care, which is that we're all related and we're all responsible to each other. It was beautiful to see that idea, this indigenous Navajo idea brought into police culture, and to see the cadets have to wrestle with it, where sometimes they had to be the enforcer, but other times they just needed to be someone who could listen and provide compassion and comfort for someone who wasn't receiving it.

Alison Stewart: David, the three of you're doing this interview from within the Navajo Nation, to screen the film for tribe members. Are you nervous?

David Nordstrom: I'm nervous. Yes. Very much so.

Alex Jablonski: We were hoping to screen it where the cops don't have jurisdiction.

Alison Stewart: It's a really excellent docuseries. It will be premiering on HBO on October 17th. It will be available to stream on Max. There are three hour-long episodes. It's called Navajo Police: Class 57. I've been speaking with his co-directors, Kahlil Hudson, Alex Jablonski, and David Nordstrom. Have a terrific screening tonight.

Alex Jablonski: Thank you so much.

Kahlil Hudson: Thank you so much.

David Nordstrom: Thank you very much for having us.

Alison Stewart: Tomorrow on the show, how do you convey the spirit and history of New York City in a museum collection? The Museum of the City of New York is taking on that challenge to celebrate its centennial. Coming up on tomorrow's show, curator Lilly Tuttle will preview the museum's People, Place, and Influence exhibition. It's got everything from a seat from Yankee Stadium in '73 to Ball gowns worn by Marian Anderson. I'm Alison Stewart. I'll meet you back here next time.

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