The Rapid City Police Department has had a relationship with the Council of Elders since the inception of the group in 2015. The Council of Elders was founded to address race relations in the community. The RCPD and Council of Elders have had an ad hoc relationship, working on developing incidents, or as a response to community concerns that had been brought to the Council of Elders from the RCPD. The Council of Elders has been actively involved in several processes to improve the community and police relations. For instance, the Council of Elders has been imbedded in the Rapid City Police Department’s International Association of Chiefs of Police Collective Healing Initiative. The group has attended numerous grant planning meetings and participated in a listening session workgroup, which was facilitated by the grant partnered researcher to create deliverables for improving race relations in Rapid City.
The Rapid City Police Department is requesting that we receive technical and training assistance in creating a formalized partnership with the Council of Elders. The partnership would be created to procedurally address issues and create resolutions through mediation, facilitated by the Council of Elders between the community and the RCPD. We believe that this constructive and critical relationship can be built with the Rapid City Council of Elders.
The RCPD is seeking technical assistance in developing a plan to mutually address divisive events and conflict resolution in Rapid City through a structured and procedural process developed with formalized relations with the Council of Elders. We believe this could be achieved by building a strong foundation with the Council of Elders and Rapid City Police Command staff. The RCPD is requesting the 7 members of the Council of Elders along with 7 Law Enforcement representatives travel to DC to conduct a site visit/educational tour of the National Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian to set a tone of healing and partnership between the two groups. In addition to the site visit, we are requesting to also include a proactive 3rd party discussion/mediation sessions on co-developing a method to address divisive events, ensuring public safety and community concerns are mutually being addressed. The site visit trip would be followed up with training and technical assistance in Rapid City to assist the Council of Elders in building capacity to allow them to handle community conflict resolutions as well as education on best practices and lessons learned to conduct divisive event mediation.
The Rapid City Police Department (RCPD) has trust issues and conflict with many from the Native American Community, as our agency is the present-day representation of a historical mistrust of government. The Rapid City Police Department faces generationally transmitted cultural distrust of the government and racial tension attributed to our shared history, such as the Wounded Knee Massacre and the breaking of Black Hills Treaties. Part of our trauma-informed policing strategy is an acknowledgment of the historical truths and understanding how this historical trauma impacts police and public interactions. We have made great strides in our trauma-informed policing strategy, by delivering historical trauma training to every sworn and non-sworn member of the Department. However, we still have a great divide between our Department and the present day misrepresentation of that historical trauma and mistrust of law enforcement. We feel that we are one divisive event away from erasing all the great work we have done to improve race relations in Rapid City.
The Rapid City Police Department is extremely concerned about the upcoming installation of the Keystone XL Pipeline in South Dakota. We do not have either the capacity or an avenue to address this issue in a formal or constructive manner with community members to de-escalate division before it occurs, because there is not an established advocacy/interest group (such as the NAACP) who advocates on behalf of the Native Americans. This lack of a formalized and legitimate relationship with an advocacy or interest groups leaves the public no avenue to work through a trusted third party to address issues with the Police department either. There are very limited lines of communication between the Native American Community and police because of both the mistrust and also the lack of formalized relationships.
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