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for law enforcement across the country."
• The partnership known as Project Safe Bakken has resulted in the FBI putting additional full-time agents in Minot, Bismarck and Sidney, Mont., and two temporary agents elsewhere in the oil patch. It also includes the promise of other agencies to lend more manpower and expertise in some individual cases, particularly on cross-border issues like organized gangs and drug trafficking.
• "It probably doesn't sound like much of a surge," said Chris Warrener, special agent in charge of the FBI's Minneapolis office. "But it's what we can do within the current constraints that we have. It has kind of been an evolution on attempting to get a handle on an emerging crime threat."
• Some of the help from feds can be measured in miles. Austin Skero II, chief Border Patrol agent for the Grand Forks sector, said his officers rarely ventured south of U.S. Highway 2, which stretches from Grand Forks to Williston, before the oil boom. Now they occasionally help with calls as far south as Interstate 94, which connects Fargo and Dickinson.
• "We're backing up local police officers, local sheriff's deputies, so that they can effectively enforce the law in their state," Skero said. "These things continually shift, so you really never know where the threat is going to emerge next, but I think we can all agree that the activity is in North Dakota now and it's probably going to be here to stay for quite some time."
• The increase in the number of police calls in northwestern North Dakota cities is startling, a North Dakota State University report shows. Service calls to Williams County have skyrocketed from 693 in 2008 to 2,400 in 2011. Watford City police received 41 calls in 2006 and 4,000 in 2011.
• Officials attribute oil patch traffic to increased crime in South Dakota as well.
• "Where we can make a difference, we've seen over the last few days, is in our staying power," Sweetow said. "We don't have to worry about whether we can cross a city boundary or a county line or even a state border. And we have the luxury, because we're not going form 911 call to 911 call, to focus on crimes that are more complex; things that they simply aren't able to tackle by virtue of their staffing."
• Warrener and Sweetow acknowledged that local law enforcement is right to be skeptical about the federal presence. It's a typically conservative area that wants government to stay out of its business. Sweetow said local officials told him "without a lot of detail" that they've been burned before by federal agencies.
• "They don't want the feds to come in and make a lot of noise and declare victory and go home," Warrener says. "I do not in any way want to create high expectations, especially in the austere budget times that we have."
• The idea for Project Safe Bakken grew first out of an FBI-sponsored meeting in

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