Jacob Archambault was fatally shot by Rosebud Sioux Tribe Law Enforcement in South Dakota.
“The cops came to my house from across the road,” he recalled, “and said, ‘Do you have a son named Derrick Scott?’ And I says, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘He walked into the police department and had a heart attack and dropped over dead.’ I said, ‘No.’”
While Lee Enterprises was able to obtain a small batch of FBI documents through a public records request, the results only furthered Scott’s confusion. The response does, however, include a determination that agents found “no evidence of a federal crime” and that “no federal violation or subject exist to further investigate or charge.”
And soon after a previous story in this series probed police conduct in one of those deaths — the 2018 shooting of Adam Poor Bear in the reservation town of Parmelee — the chief administrator of the Rosebud Sioux Tribal Law Enforcement Services department, Steve DeNoyer, resigned his position. That’s a significant number, even considering that Native Americans died in law enforcement interactions at a rate of 1.6 per 100,000 in 2020. That rate was five times greater than it was for whites and three times greater than it is for Blacks that year. At Rosebud, the rate is 8 per 100,000 every year for the past 10 years.
After tribal police fatally shot a halfway-house escapee named Raymond Gassman on the Rosebud reservation on Feb. 2, 2016, his family was also left wondering why. They sought reports from the police and FBI, but never received the documents or answers they were looking for, his brother Lowell Gassman said.
After police shot and killed Jacob Archambault on Jan. 27, 2019, an FBI investigation uncovered allegations that police had assaulted him and threatened his life. A Lee Enterprises investigation identified five witnesses who claimed to know of such threats. While the U.S. Attorney for South Dakota ultimately determined that officers’ actions were justified, Archambault’s loved ones have continued to question what happened — and why.
After Michael Lee Wright died May 16, 2023, in a high-speed chase with tribal police, his mother, Verna Larvie, heard that police pursued him at speeds of up to 100 mph on a gravel road before putting down a spike strip that caused his fatal crash. But she said she’s never received information from the FBI or tribal police.
But His Holy Horse said the Rosebud Tribal Law Enforcement operated in ways that made a difficult job even harder. While everyone else in the department was subject to training and background checks “to make sure we had integrity and weren’t going to lie” and knew proper protocols, His Holy Horse said, DeNoyer wasn’t held to the same standard.
Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | SoundStack | All Of Our Podcasts In February 2023, Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team filed an open records request with the BIA’s Office of Justice Services, seeking six years of individual or group use-of-force reports as well as reviews, summaries, “findings of policy violations or training deficiencies,” disciplinary actions and criminal investigative reports of incidents of use of force.Nearly a year and a half later, the Lee Enterprises request for records remains pending.
“You can't arrest a girl and then add her on social media when she gets out of jail and be with her,” he said. “You can't sit there and say, ‘Well, I found a little bit of meth on you, but I'll let you go if you perform oral sex on me or have sex with me.’” Waln said that his efforts to expose such “internal corruption” within the department led police to target him.
Travis Leading Cloud spent 12 years working for the Rosebud tribe’s correctional services department, supervising jail staff and working to help open a new correctional facility on the reservation. Led until recently by a chief without significant law enforcement experience, the department lacks cohesion, direction and discipline, he said, and officers are prone to “bullying” and other misapplications of power.“This is abuse of power,” he added. “This is gangster. … This is a mafia.”
As for closed investigations, Freedman said that if “no charges are filed, the existence of an investigation will not be made public, unless through the standard Freedom of Information Act process.” “But who's going to investigate? Well, they have someone come down from the FBI to check you out or someone from the Internal Affairs Department of the BIA come down, and next thing you know, they don't do nothing. Nothing happens.”
“If I would go to Rosebud for groceries, they would tailgate me all the way down there, and then when I come back,” Poor Bear said. “And then they'd be waiting, and they’d be sitting out here, out by my house, like watching me that whole month.”The intimidation continued at his son’s funeral, Poor Bear said, when the police started “pulling cars over” as everyone was leaving.
Brandis recalled the time Addie called to tell her she was being pulled over by a tribal officer and was afraid. Brandis left her job at the Todd County School District, where she works as a community liaison for the public schools on the reservation, and went to help.
Lee-National Rosebud Indian Reservation Police Sioux Indian Reservation Native Americans In The United States Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Law Enforcement Criminal Justice Criminal Law National Security Law Legal Action Justice Crime
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