Given poverty, alcoholism, and all the other woes so prevalent in Indian Country, it is hard to understand why Native Americans on reservations also should have to do without adequate law enforcement.

It's time for Congress to quit holding hearings on the problem and actually do something about it.

Last week, during the second hearing this year before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, native leaders and former federal officials testified that crime continues to worsen on reservations in large part because the government hasn't made law enforcement a priority.

It turns out the Bureau of Indian Affairs receives only about 30 percent of the funding it needs for law enforcement, with the result that there often is no 24-hour police coverage and officers often must patrol alone and investigate potentially dangerous calls without backup.

So, sure enough, Bureau of Justice statistics show that violent crime on reservations is 101 per 1,000 people, compared with the national average of 41 per 1,000. Indian women are victims of rape and sexual assault at three times the national average, and drug trafficking is rampant.

In addition, Amnesty International has said the federal government has created such a complex maze of tribal, state and federal jurisdictions that perpetrators often are able to escape justice, and in some cases there actually are jurisdictional vacuums that encourages assaults.

In his testimony last week, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., agreed that "the jurisdictional issue is a big issue," but he said the sheer lack of law enforcement people is the single biggest problem.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., the chairman of the committee, said the testimony "describes a law enforcement system that is broken."

(It is interesting that five of the eight U.S. attorneys who were the victims of controversial firings were outspoken members of a Justice Department subcommittee on Native American issues. "It is not a mere coincidence," said former Minnesota U.S. Attorney Thomas Heffelfinger, who chaired the subcommittee.)

For generations, Americans have conveniently ignored what goes on in Indian Country. But we can't go on denying its residence the basic protections of law and order.