Bakken: Examining Efforts to Address Law Enforcement, Infrastructure and Economic Development Needs

The Bakken formation has emerged in recent years as one of the most critical sources of oil in the United States. As a result, we are seeing things in Eastern Montana/Western North Dakota that we have never seen before, both good and bad. It is a story of rapid and dramatic flood of workers, families and wealth into an area that is providing an economic boom for local businesses and communities, but it is also a story of local communities left scrambling for scarce resources to meet urgent infrastructure and housing needs of a largely transient workforce, and the struggle of those communities to address immediate needs without doing significant harm to the longtime residents making a fraction of an oil worker's salary; folks in the community like police officers, social workers and school teachers. It is the story of local law enforcement agencies stretched thin, yet facing unprecedented threats in the sheer number and complexity of increasingly violent crimes; increased rates of human trafficking, drug smuggling and criminal byproducts of drug cartel targeting the large paychecks of oil workers. In more human terms, it is the story of a young family living with her six children in a camper for 20 months because of the scarcity of quality affordable housing.