RAPID CITY, SD — Tuesday morning Law enforcement in Rapid City and the wider pennington county area came together for a conference introducing a new “Parole Accountability Task Force” seeking to place increased accountability and policing around parolees, with a focus on repeat offenders. 

“Over the course of the last several months, parolees have been involved in a variety of high-profile crimes in our community, including a number of violent crimes, shootings, assaults, and even homicides,” says Rapid City Chief of Police Don Hedrick. “We’re going to continue to engage with top state leaders and officials within the South Dakota Department of Corrections to see how we can work together to ensure accountability for parolees who continue to victimize others while outside the penitentiary setting”.

Rapid City Police have been heavily focused on reporting the frequency of arrests associated with parolees, reflecting a trend of broader focus on parolee violations by law enforcement agencies in the state. In April, the state Department of Corrections applied for a 900,000 dollar grant from the DOJ for the improvement of parolee monitoring. State recidivism rates stand at a high since 2004, with 1 in 2 former inmates returning to prison. This staggering failing to rehabilitate has been linked by many to lacking, overcrowded prisons and what have been implied to be slacking parole systems – and among many others, recidivism has been linked to lacking support systems for the overrepresented native population, as well as lacking support systems for those incarcerated for substance abuse.

“Our main priority is going to be looking for absconders, parolees that have current warrants and also helping out in assisting and doing parole checks,” said Scott Sitts of the RCPD. The task force acts as a collaboration between the RCPD, Pennington County Sheriff’s Office, and five other law-enforcement organizations both state and national. Out of 3,500 parolees, only 92 (Via SD Searchlight) were reported as absconders in 2025, the lowest in the state since 2010.

In spite of law enforcement’s new “tough on crime” approach to the number of alleged violent offenses, publicly available data supporting parolees as a major source of violent crime appears to be lacking as of the time of writing. Out of the nearly 1,400 individuals re-imprisoned across the state, 35% of this 50% are confirmed as having been re-imprisoned for technical violations related to their parole (non-criminal violations, such as failure to check in, or failed drug test) while just over 300 were individuals released from prison who had reoffended within three years (Via SDPB). Data is unclear what percentage of these new charges were active parolees at this time. 

“It shouldn’t be that we necessarily have to have a new conviction for there to be a parole violation, so those things are not mutually exclusive,” said States Attorney Lara Roetzel, who hypothesized “You could be seeing in those numbers [sic] people that weren’t convicted of the new crime, but it was handled within the parole system, and that’s what we want to see, and that’s what we’re not seeing enough of in our community. What I’m being told is, in most cases, we won’t even consider a parole violation unless you get a new conviction and it can’t be a new conviction for something that is considered low level”. The departments confirmed that they are still gathering data, and did not have information confirming this hypothesis at this time.

PCSO Chief Deputy Mark Hughes was scornful during the press conference that out of parolees arrested in Rapid City, 60% were released under supervision, saying “60% of people that come into our jail for whatever reason aren’t being dealt with by the parole system, they’re just being put back out into the community. Under supervision, again. That seems like a high number to me, which would kind of talk to the point [sic] that there’s something broken that we need to address,” said Hughes. He did not appear to have data showing why their arrests, if they were based on prosecutable evidence, did not result in indictment or conviction. 

In regular emails received by The Rapid City Post, the RCPD reports on arrests in Rapid City. Since the start of the year, 17 parole-related arrests have been reported as of the current date, two of which were arrests related to violent crime. Following a report in which a police officer was assaulted by a parolee on the sixth of this month (one of the two violent cases previously mentioned) all reports received from the RCPD  have had a special focus, entirely reporting on the arrests of parolees, primarily related to petty theft and drug-related charges.

Enforcement operations related to this new Task Force are expected to begin on Wednesday, April 15th.