A Sioux Falls officer nearly died. The governor announced emergency reforms. But the system was broken long before this week — and the people who broke it aren’t the ones cleaning it up.
On Monday afternoon in Sioux Falls, a police officer followed a woman into what turned out to be an ambush. A man waiting around the corner shot him multiple times. Both suspects — Darren Richards and Loretta Bettelyoun — were on state-supervised parole at the time of the attack. The officer survived. Barely.
Both suspects are Rapid City natives.
By Tuesday, Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken was calling South Dakota’s parole system “broken.” Police Chief Jon Thum and Minnehaha County Sheriff Mike Milstead agreed. Milstead noted that at that moment, 114 of the 400 people sitting in his county jail were on parole holds. Thum told reporters he felt like a broken record — that law enforcement had been repeating this warning about repeat offenders for years without being heard.
By Thursday, Governor Larry Rhoden had announced a new round of emergency directives: an enhanced compliance unit, five new parole agent positions, stiffer sanctions for repeat violators, and a near-doubling of revocations in the first week of implementation.
Credit where it’s due. Those are concrete steps.
But the question worth asking — the one a press release won’t answer — is how South Dakota got here in the first place.
The Numbers Tell the Story
South Dakota’s recidivism rate for its 2021 adult cohort hit 50 percent — the highest recorded in at least 18 years.
For Native Americans, who make up 35 percent of the male prison population and 61 percent of the female population despite being roughly 10 percent of the state’s general population, the rate is 59 percent. For Native women specifically, 67 percent returned to prison within three years.
This is not a new crisis. It is a neglected one.
In 2013, under Governor Dennis Daugaard, South Dakota enacted sweeping sentencing reform through Senate Bill 70.
The results were measurable: parole revocations dropped 41 percent, average parole caseloads fell 18 percent, and the state saved more than $34 million by 2015. The system, by the numbers, was improving.
Then it stopped improving.
The Noem Years
Kristi Noem took office in 2019 and announced she would modernize South Dakota’s correctional system. What followed was a different kind of modernization.
Over two years, Noem bypassed the Board of Pardons and Paroles — the oversight body that reviews clemency applications — and granted commutations to 20 people without board review. Her two immediate predecessors had not done this.
In at least one documented case, she overruled a board denial, skipped notifying victims’ families, and may have violated her own executive order establishing the review process.
Her corrections secretary, Kellie Wasko, was eventually forced out after legislators lost confidence in the department’s leadership. Rhoden replaced her with Nick Lamb after taking office.
Noem’s plan to build a new men’s prison south of Sioux Falls was rejected by the Legislature. Rhoden had to start over with a new site and a new plan.
By the time Noem left for Washington in January 2025 to join the Trump administration, South Dakota’s recidivism rate was at an 18-year high, DOC leadership had been upended, and the prison infrastructure plan was in disarray.
Rhoden inherited all of it.
Two Cities, Two Different Situations
Here is something worth understanding about the geography of this crisis: Sioux Falls has been sounding this alarm longer, and it already has the infrastructure to show for it.
The Sioux Falls Area Joint Fugitive Task Force — a multi-agency body focused on violent crimes and outstanding warrants — has operated for years, bringing together the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office, the Sioux Falls Police Department, and the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office. That collaborative didn’t emerge from a press release. It was built over time, out of sustained pressure from law enforcement leaders who kept showing up and kept getting ignored.
Pennington County’s Parolee Accountability Task Force, by contrast, was announced approximately 36 hours before early and absentee voting started for the June 2nd municipal election, with Sheriff Mueller and State’s Attorney Roetzel named in the press release.
After the Sioux Falls shooting, Mueller and Hedrick issued a joint statement noting that additional data from the Pennington County task force would be released later this week. Chief Thum, meanwhile, called for the statewide conversation to be a priority — and then added a telling qualifier: after the election season.
Who Is Paying For This?
Governor Rhoden’s directives are real. The five new agents are real. The doubled revocation rate in week one is real. These are not nothing.
But the announcement is notably quiet on how the new positions will be funded. The administration noted it will continue working with lawmakers on “additional reforms and funding” — future tense.
The broader Smarter Supervision Initiative, announced less than a month ago, is partly contingent on an $892,000 Bureau of Justice grant application that has not yet been awarded.
Chief Thum said it plainly this week: fixing this is going to cost money. That conversation with the Legislature is apparently still ahead.
South Dakota lawmakers acknowledged this week that they passed only two bills specifically addressing parole in the last legislative session. That number is worth sitting with.
What Accountability Actually Looks Like
A near-murder of a police officer by two parolees — both of whom had active “attempt to locate” warrants issued — is not a system working. It is a system that absorbed years of deferred attention and is now paying the bill.
The suspects are from Rapid City. The crisis is statewide. The reforms are being announced in an election year, by candidates competing to be the one who finally fixes it.
The question for Rapid City, for Pennington County, and for the citizens of South Dakota is straightforward: now that the bill has come due, will the people making the announcements still be making them in January?
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