Complaints about law enforcement have steadily risen over the past few years, owing in part to an online portal that simplifies the process of making a complaint to the state Division of Criminal Investigation about alleged police misconduct.
Even with the rise, though, fewer than 1% of certified officers in South Dakota were disciplined for their behavior in 2024.
“I know we get mired down sometimes in the misconduct, the complaints, the investigations. It’s easy for us to see or be of the perspective that there’s a lot of things going on in the state that are concerning,” Law Enforcement Training Director Hank Prim said Wednesday at a meeting of the state’s Law Enforcement Officers Standards and Training Commission in Pierre. “But the perspective in that stat I think really shows us where reality is.”
Prim presented the figures in a summary of what he called an “Integrity Report,” which lays out complaints against officers and their disposition. Prim pulled it together at the urging of commission member Neil Fulton, who is the dean of the University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law. Fulton said the State Bar of South Dakota produces a similar report for the edification of that group’s board members.
In Prim’s one-page rundown, he noted that complaints against officers are up again this year, continuing a trend in increased complaints that’s held for the past three years. There have been 142 complaints filed in 2024 thus far, a 24% increase over this point in 2023.
The commission also reviews applications for possible certification and entry into the state’s basic law enforcement training course. In 2024, the commission denied 13 total applications: eight from law enforcement hopefuls, four for people hoping to become 911 dispatchers, and one from a person who’d hoped to be a school sentinel. Sentinels are non-law enforcement personnel allowed to carry weapons in schools, in theory to retaliate against safety threats.
Another 13 students were dismissed from basic law enforcement training, five for disciplinary reasons, one for failure to prove their skills proficiency and seven for academic failure.
There were 16 officers who voluntarily gave up their certification after a misconduct complaint: 13 law enforcement officers, two 911 dispatchers and one person who was certified in both areas.
You can read the full article at South Dakota Searchlight.