It's time for the Feds to shake down Rapid City

It didn't start under the Rounds and Daugaard administrations but the rates of violent crime in South Dakota increased dramatically during their watches. 

GOP leadership in the state, especially in Rapid City, has fostered conditions where reported aggravated assaults have increased exponentially. When the state's attorney general and judiciary are on the GOP dole nothing in Rapid City will change. 

Law is not order.

In 2011 Daniel Tiger chose to take out two enemy Rapid City Police Department personnel with him rather than be gunned down in cold blood like Christopher Capps was in the previous year. 

US Attorney General Eric Holder went to South Dakota to keep the smoldering war between the RCPD and Indigenous Americans from a flash point and was accompanied by then-US Attorney Brendan Johnson who participated in the joint Native American Issues Subcommittee and the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee meeting. 

Johnson was recently interviewed as part of a wider investigation of rampant police brutality and "officer involved shootings" in the reservation border town.

“I am not at all unsympathetic to the situation the police department in Rapid City is in,” Johnson said. But, he adds, “I’m also sympathetic to the frustration that has to exist within the (Native) community. If there is an example of bad policing, of brutality, the challenge to try to get justice in a case like that in a place like Rapid City would be exceptionally difficult, exceptionally difficult.” [All of the fatal police shootings in one town involved Native Americans. How common is this?]

Little wonder cops’ lives suck so they reliably abuse their families, alcohol, drugs, food, power, detainees and occasionally murder their wives, even vilify people like Leonard Peltier.

Since the South Dakota Republican Party thrives on violence and hypocrisy reigns supreme at the highest levels of power in South Dakota residents endure Policing for Profit and civil forfeiture so the current Earth hating governor can crow about her leadership and self-reliance while moral hazards pay the bills.

Learn more from Ted McDermott at the Missoulian.