RAPID CITY, SOUTH DAKOTA – Trinity Peoples flipped through a three-ring binder, searching for a way to put scraps of information together in a way that might explain the death of her brother, Barney, at the hands of city police officers.
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She knew her brother, like her, was a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation who was born and spent his early years on the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
She knew he had long struggled with alcoholism and homelessness, as well as diabetes that led to a partial amputation of his foot.
She knew her brother was well known to the police, who’d seen him on the Rapid City streets, off and on, for years.
She knew the state Division of Criminal Investigation had determined that the pair of officers who’d killed her brother were “justified in firing their weapons and using lethal force†on the third floor of a house that wasn’t Barney’s.
And she knew that her brother died in the early afternoon of March 26, 2022, when a large crowd was gathering on the other side of town to protest the owner of a local hotel, the Grand Gateway, for she would no longer serve Native Americans.
“We were protesting against racism,†Peoples said. “And they were killing him at the same time.â€
It wasn’t the first time a Native American protest has coincided with a Native American dying in a police interaction in the city. In 2014, local police and Allen Locke, one day after he participated in a designed to draw attention to police mistreatment of Native Americans.
While DCI investigators that an intoxicated Locke was holding a knife and ignored commands to drop it, warranting the officer’s decision to fire five times, Locke’s death the concerns about systemic racial bias the protest had been meant to address – and that persist a decade later.
In Rapid City, Native Americans represent about a tenth of the population but nearly 60% of those who have died in fatal encounters with law enforcement since 2007, according to an analysis of from DCI, which investigates officer-involved shootings in the state.
Of the seven people killed in such interactions in the city since May 2021, all were Native Americans.
That’s a notable disproportion, even considering that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that Native Americans died at a significantly nationwide than any other racial or ethnic group in police encounters between 2017 and 2020.
According to the CDC’s most , Native Americans died as a result of law enforcement interventions at a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 in 2020. That’s more than five times the rate for whites, who died at a rate of 0.3 per 100,000, and nearly triple the rate for Blacks, who died at a rate of 0.6.
In Rapid City, where the Native American population is 8,000 people, the rate was about 8.9 fatal encounters per 100,000 Native Americans each year for the past 17 years.
Lack of transparency leaves answers elusive
Brendyn Medina, community relations specialist for the Rapid City Police Department, acknowledged, in an email response to questions, that “Native Americans face adversity at disproportionate levels and have a disproportionate representation in the number of officer-involved shootings across the country.†But he said racial bias has never been a factor in RCPD officers’ decisions to use force.
When officers in his department pull the trigger, Medina said, they’re reacting not to a person’s race but rather “to the involved individuals’ actions.â€
“In all officer-involved shootings involving the Rapid City Police Department,†Medina noted, “every suspect possessed a deadly weapon and/or posed a direct deadly threat to the responding officer (and, in some cases, an innocent bystander).â€
DCI investigators say that group includes Barney Peoples, who they say was aiming a rifle at police when he was shot.
And footage shown to reporters from the Rapid City Journal and other outlets seemed to DCI’s finding.
The Journal that the video showed Barney Peoples “sitting on the floor holding a rifle with a scope. A freeze-frame of that particular moment shows the gun was pointed at the first officer,†who then moved “to the left of the doorway seeking cover while shouting for Peoples to drop the weapon, after which both officers begin firing.â€
The Attorney General’s office responded to a request for this footage and other records for this story by saying such documents are “not subject to disclosure under South Dakota’s public records laws.â€
For Peoples’ family and others affected by such fatal encounters with law enforcement, the state’s restrictive public records laws make it difficult to gain answers about how their loved ones died.
And that lack of transparency has fueled doubts among relatives and activists that everyone killed by police truly posed a threat. Those critics cite, for example, a 2023 police shooting of a Native American man who had a that resembled a gun but no actual firearm.
As for Trinity Peoples, who couldn’t bring herself to watch footage of her brother being shot, she said she still has “a lot of questions surrounding†the officers’ decision to use deadly force.
Disproportionate death in police encounters
While questions swirl about the specific incidents, data indicates Native Americans do disproportionately die in police encounters in Rapid City, a city of nearly in the heart of the Black Hills, an area to the Lakota.
Only of the city’s population identify solely as Native American or Alaska Native, according to 2023 U.S. Census data, but Native Americans represent 57% of those killed in officer-involved shootings there over the past 17 years.
Between 2007 and early 2024, 12 Native Americans were fatally shot by officers from the Rapid City Police Department and the Pennington County Sheriff’s Department, according to DCI reports. (Rapid City is the seat of Pennington County.) During the same period, city police and sheriff’s deputies have shot and killed eight white people.
DCI has determined all of these killings were justified. A spokesperson for South Dakota Marty Jackley, whose office includes DCI, declined to comment for this story.
These trends are not confined to Rapid City.
Native Americans also account for 75% of the victims in the 79 police-involved shootings in South Dakota between 2001 and 2023, according to data from the Rapid City-based activist group NDN Collective.
And the CDC found that, between 2017 and 2020, Native Americans died at a significantly than other racial and ethnic groups in encounters with law enforcement nationwide.
These deaths usually occur in places like Rapid City: off-reservation communities near tribal land.
That’s the conclusion, at least, of one of the few academic studies to look at the issue, a 2019 by the economist Matthew Harvey that relied on the publicly available but incomplete data from the database to look at deaths from 2000 to 2017.
He found that most of these deadly encounters occurred “outside tribal statistical areas†and involved non-tribal police for the period he looked at.
Of 279 fatal encounters identified in his study, 150 occurred outside tribal land, and 195 involved interactions with local or state police, not with the tribal or federal officers who typically enforce laws on reservation land.
In violent encounters, a variety of circumstances
The circumstances and locations of these deaths vary widely.
In 2017, , a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe with a history of mental illness, after being handcuffed, shocked 12 times with a Taser and punched 13 times while in custody of Omaha police officers, two of whom were charged but of assault in the incident.
The same year, in Odanah, Wisconsin, a 14-year-old Ojibwe boy named died after being shot by a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had a knife – a claim the boy’s family has disputed.
In 2020, Phoenix police fatally shot , a suicidal Navajo man approaching officers with a knife in a mental-health facility.
Also in 2020, a Chippewa-Cree man named died from multiple gunshot wounds after police in Billings, Montana, say he pointed a gun at them – a claim his family has .
Earlier this year, Cody Whiterock, of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribe, was by Bureau of Indian Affairs agents outside of tribal lands, in Riddle, Idaho, while fleeing from an attempted arrest on Nevada’s Duck Valley Reservation.
Monte Mills, of the Native American Law Center at the University of Washington, said there’s strong evidence showing Indigenous people are “the most impacted, in terms of police violence outside of Indian Country.â€
“I don’t think that there's any doubt that police – law enforcement in general – interact with and have more violent encounters with people of color, particularly Indigenous people, than any other group,†he said.
Racial imbalance, harsher treatment
In part, this imbalance may reflect the fact that the vast majority – nearly 90% – of Native Americans live of what is now considered tribal land.
Mills notes that Native Americans’ movement into predominantly non-Native communities is no accident.
While government policies forced Native people onto reservations in the 19th century, like the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 encouraged them to leave and move into nearby cities as part of a broader campaign to compel Indigenous Americans to assimilate.
“A lot of it, in my view, has to do with policies of the federal government, in terms of relocating significant numbers of Native people from tribal communities to cities like Seattle and Oklahoma City and Denver and Albuquerque,†Mills said. “So you have significant populations of historically displaced peoples in those communities, which presents higher concentrations of impacts in terms of interactions with police.â€
Those interactions come not only in the form of violent encounters but also as arrests and incarcerations.
American Indian and Alaska Natives are incarcerated at the national rate in state and federal prisons, to the U.S. Bureau of Justice . And there’s they receive harsher sentences than other racial groups.
In South Dakota, Natives also encounter the criminal justice system at higher rates than other groups.
As of 2022, Native Americans accounted for 9.4% of the South Dakota population, while Whites accounted for 78.8%. But Whites and Natives “were almost equally represented in offender admissions†to the prison system, with each accounting for about 45% of those admitted in 2022, according to a South Dakota Department of Corrections .
The same year, FBI data shows 22,910 Native Americans were arrested, versus just 15,691 white people, in South Dakota.
In Rapid City, the disparity is even more pronounced.
There, Native Americans account for less than a tenth of the city’s population but for more than six in 10 arrests between 2012 and 2022, according to the most recent FBI crime .
Over that decade, local police made 71,771 arrests. Of those, 44,850 involved Native Americans. To put that in perspective, each of Rapid City’s approximately 7,500 Native American residents would have to be arrested once a year for six years to reach that number.
Medina, of the Rapid City Police Department, said these “arrests are reviewed by supervisors, prosecutors, and the court system†as well as by an accreditation process that “continually reviews our policies, practices and crime data to ensure we are within the best practices in policing.â€
“We don’t dictate the race of the person who is calling 911 for emergency assistance or to report a crime, nor do we dictate the race of the suspect,†Medina added. “We respond to the call for service, investigate, and handle these calls appropriately, regardless of the victim's or suspect's race.â€
He also noted that the issue of “disproportionate Native American arrests and victimization is much bigger than policing alone,†pointing in particular to issues such as “health disparities and poverty†that “disproportionately affect some populations.â€
Native Americans are also vastly more likely than members of other racial and ethnic groups to be victims of crime in South Dakota and Rapid City.
Despite accounting for only about 9% of the population statewide and , FBI data indicated Native Americans were the victims of 32% of the crimes in South Dakota and 61% of the crimes in Rapid City between 2012 and 2022.
For Native community, racism becomes ‘numbing agent’
These disproportionate rates of arrest, incarceration, victimization and fatal encounters have produced a palpable and ever-present feeling of racism in Rapid City’s Native community, said Sunny Red Bear, associate director of organizing for the Rapid City-based activist group NDN Collective.
“Living here in Rapid City, it’s really intense,†Red Bear said. “A lot of people that I talk to have moved here from other states or from other cities within South Dakota or even east (of the Missouri) river, it’s such a different mentality here, and I think we get used to it. We get used to mistreatment. We get used to discrimination, racial profiling. We get used to racism. And it becomes like a numbing agent for us to start accepting the misconduct and mistreatment of Native people. So I think Rapid City has created that culture here, but it’s not the only place that it exists.â€
Disparate arrest, sentencing, crime victimization and fatal encounters rates are not uncommon, especially in cities with large Native American communities.
After a fatal police shooting exacerbated long-standing of law enforcement among Native Americans in Riverton, Wyoming, for example, the Casper Star-Tribune that seven out of 10 arrests made by local police over a 10-year period were of Indigenous people, who make up only about 10% of the population.
Walter Lamar, a longtime FBI agent as well as a former deputy director and acting director of law enforcement for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said he has a “very difficult†time deciding whether racism is at the root of high rates of fatal encounters in Rapid City and other off-reservation settings.
“Because I am Native, I have an infinite love for our Native people and my relatives,†Lamar says. “And as a former police officer, I also have a love for people who are willing to go out and strap on a gun everyday and provide peace and order in their communities. So it’s a hard question to say.â€
In the case of an armed suspect, for example, Lamar says the response from law enforcement can differ greatly depending on whether the officer works on a reservation or in a community where Native Americans are a relatively small, marginalized part of the community.
On a reservation, he said, an officer who “understands where this person comes from and what they’ve lived through and what they are living through ... may not be as quick to exercise deadly force,†Lamar said.
Off tribal land, a non-Native officer may “have a whole different perception,†Lamar said.
“Sadly,†he said, “there’s going to be some implicit bias that factors in.â€
Police training calls for lethal force
An officer’s training also factors in, Lamar said. And that training tells police that “action beats reaction every time.â€
“What that means is, if someone’s armed with a knife and they come at you, they can close a distance of 21 feet or whatever it is, and before you can get a gun out, they can stab you,†Lamar said. “So that’s why law enforcement is trained, if a person won’t drop a knife, to shoot and kill them.â€
Medina, of the Rapid City Police Department, acknowledged that officers have a “trained reaction to meet lethal force with lethal force.†And he noted that the stakes are high for police as well. In 2011, a report of people drinking alcohol in public turned into a shootout that left two Rapid City police and one Native American .
“When presented with such lethal force by an offender, police officers are trained to stop the threat using lethal force,†Medina wrote, “and unfortunately, officers have to make a decision to defend their lives or the lives of others in a split second. And in cases like these, officers are not provided an opportunity to de-escalate the situation.â€
He also said the department trains officers in other areas, including “the historical trauma some members of our Native American community experience,†and noted that the department “has created a number of specialized units and programs geared toward disparities with our city’s Native American population.â€
‘There’s not a history of trust there’
Brendan Johnson, a former U.S. Attorney for South Dakota, said the fraught dynamic between Rapid City’s Native American community and law enforcement is felt most acutely on the north side, where a large share of the Native American population lives in an area with high rates of crime.
“Those are really tough neighborhoods, tough communities,†said , who is also the former chair of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Native American Issues Subcommittee. “So you’ve got police trying to police them. There’s not a history of trust there. There’s not a history of good feelings.
“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.â€
Johnson knows that difficulty firsthand.
In 2014, Johnson’s office brought charges of using unreasonable force and assault against an Oglala Sioux tribal police officer who was caught on using a some 28 times on an intoxicated tribal citizen who was on the ground.
Though the incident occurred on the nearby Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the trial was held in Rapid City, where a federal jury found the officer on all counts.
Natalie Stites Means, a Rapid City-based for Native rights and executive director of the Community Organizing for Unified Power Council, argues that a similar lack of accountability exists when it comes to fatal encounters with local law enforcement, noting that the Division of Criminal Investigation has invariably that the killings were justified.
“People need to see justice,†she said. “They need to see it. How can you have 100% of the shootings upheld by the command all the way up the state 100% of the time? That is impossible. And there’s never any sort of public accountability for it.â€
Native advocates voice concerns about ‘dual system of justice’
The sense among Native Americans that the law is not fairly applied in Rapid City and in South Dakota has been building for decades.
In March 2000, the South Dakota Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a entitled “Native Americans in South Dakota: An Erosion of Confidence in the Justice System.â€
“Many Native Americans in South Dakota have little or no confidence in the criminal justice system and believe that the administration of justice at the federal and state levels is permeated by racism,†the report said. “There is a strongly held perception among Native Americans that there is a dual system of justice and that race is a critical factor in determining how law enforcement and justice functions are carried out.â€
But as the authors of that report noted, these concerns were nothing new. In 1977, the same committee published a similar report that included many of the same concerns – a fact the authors of the 2000 report described as “both remarkable and disconcerting.â€
“Despair is not too strong a word to characterize the emotional feelings of many Native Americans who believe they live in a hostile environment,†the report said, adding: “Racial tensions in South Dakota are high and require the careful attention of federal civil rights officials.â€
Stites Means and other Native activists said those tensions still have not been resolved – and have not caught enough attention from federal officials.
“I always feel like there's an edginess here in Rapid City, especially in the summer months,†Stites Means said. “I’m like, ‘Gee, Rapid City could just go up in some crazy riot.’ And the feds in DC will be like, ‘How did that happen? We only got four complaints in writing last year or whatever.’ There’s a disconnect.â€
Despite this perceived disconnect, Stites Means acknowledges that the federal government hasn’t entirely overlooked claims of racial bias in Rapid City.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued the owners and operators of the Grand Gateway Hotel and Cheers Sports Lounge and Casino over alleged discrimination, after the NDN Collective filed similar in 2022.
While the justice department and the hotel’s owners reached an in November that requires the owners to apologize, implement an anti-discrimination policy and market to Native Americans, the owners continued to “deny that they engaged in, or attempted to engage in, discriminatory conduct,†the settlement said.
And late , the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights the findings of a compliance review of the Rapid City Area School District. That review found “persistent, and statistically significant, disparities in discipline for Native American students compared with white students over all the years OCR reviewed, across all the schools OCR reviewed." It also found that “the Superintendent and multiple school administrators relied on biased stereotypes regarding Native American people, including a perception that particular tribes do not value education ….â€
In response to these and other findings, the Rapid City school district agreed to make numerous changes, including “(e)xamining the root causes of racial disparities in the District’s discipline and advanced learning programs and implementing corresponding corrective action plans.â€
Stites Means said she’s happy for the federal government’s efforts to intervene in these instances but also argued that the Justice Department and other agencies have failed to “get to the heart of the police issues†in Rapid City.
That has left the local Native American community to push for reforms on its own.
Signs of these efforts were literally posted all over town earlier this year, hanging from light poles and plastered on billboards. They read “Rapid City vs. Racism†and were put there by the NDN Collective.
‘There is going to be a reckoning’
Red Bear said the racism her group is fighting manifests itself perhaps most painfully when Natives die at the hands of police.
“Our relatives are taken from us by people who are sworn to protect us,†Red Bear said, “and they just continue to uphold the system that is causing harm to our community.â€
That harm doesn’t end with a death, according to Red Bear. It continues with how these deaths are handled.
“We went to a funeral a couple days ago, and we went to the mom and asked her what can we bring?†Red Bear said. “She goes, ‘No, I just want to tell you my story. I want to tell you what happened.’
“And all of these people are coming to us to say, ‘The police never took my statement. The police never listened to me, and I was there and I saw it.’ So we see all these voices are just going unheard. And they’re just mourning their loved ones.
“So we’re trying to step in to be that place holder of being able to listen to people and documenting these things because eventually there is going to be a reckoning. And people are going to want to create change. And we’re here for it.â€
RCPD’s Medina said his department has worked hard to “build trust among the Native American†and pointed to a department-contracted study that indicated those efforts are “yielding positive results.â€
But Stites Means and others in the city’s Indigenous community said local efforts have not been enough.
“I think there’s just a huge disregard for Native people, and that disregard means, you know, split-second decisions way in favor of racial bias,†she said. “They’re quick to draw their guns, quick to escalate, and there’s very little practices around de-escalation, which I think is really important when you have white cops policing Native people, for the most part.â€
Red Bear, of the NDN Collective, said her group is pushing for change but that the barriers are high.
“I think what bothers me the most is that we don’t always have privilege and the ability or the resources to be able to hold people accountable,†she said. “And it’s sad that’s what it takes. It’s sad that it takes money to have transparency and accountability.â€
Stites Means believes real progress will only come as a result of outside pressure.
And there are signs such intervention may be coming.
Late last year, Red Bear said she and others from the NDN Collective arranged a brief meeting with Department of Justice officials to demand an investigation into the RCPD.
The group then put a “call out to the community†and began gathering “stories and experiences of violence, harassment, retaliation†at the hands of local police and presented that information to the DOJ at a two-hour follow-up meeting earlier this year, Red Bear said.
The department declined to comment on whether it has opened such an investigation, but the RCPD’s Medina said that police Chief Don Hedrick and Pennington County Sheriff Brian Mueller “proactively contacted the South Dakota U.S. Attorney's Office last summer to let the DOJ know both agencies would be open to any review from their offices. At this point, neither agency is aware of a DOJ investigation.â€
While Red Bear said the department has not indicated to her group whether it plans to formally probe racial bias in the RCPD, she said NDN Collective will continue to collect allegations of police mistreatment and push for accountability and change.
As wait for change continues, so do tragedies
While Rapid City’s Native American community waits for something to change, Trinity Peoples has not only continued to struggle to move on in the aftermath of her brother’s death in an encounter with local police. She also had to face another, similar tragedy.
On Nov. 22, 2022, Rapid City police shot and killed Peoples’ ex-husband, James Mathew Murphy.
A DCI found that the incident began when a caller “reported that Murphy was hearing voices and thought that the cops were trying to kill him.â€
It ended, investigators found, after Murphy lunged with a knife at an officer, who shot him in the arm and then the head.
DCI and the South Dakota Attorney General determined the use of lethal force was justified.
In the time since, three other Native Americans have been shot and killed by Rapid City police: , and .
During the same time period – between late 2022 and early 2023 – two Native Americans , or after being found in, the Pennington County jail: Floyd Joseph and Abbey .
