The House Judiciary Committee has voted down a bill requiring law enforcement training to include issues of concern to tribes. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Shawn Bordeaux, also brought a similar bill last year. He sought recruit training on tribal sovereignty and cultural customs, as well as a ban on chokeholds.
Bill opponents say law enforcement training already includes all that.
Shawn Bordeaux testified that new law officers should have training on where jurisdiction lies on and off reservations.
“I realize how important it is to understand different ramifications being with sovereignty and with jurisdiction, especially in my district where on one side of the highway it’s state and on the other side of the highway it’s federal trust land,” he said.
Bordeaux said some of the elements in the bill mirror the federal George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. In particular, it calls for an end to chokeholds and carotid holds.
Charlie McGuigan of the South Dakota Attorney General’s Office opposed the bill. He said the training academy does not instruct students how to perform a chokehold. But he said they’re taught that it is one possible defense when their lives are in danger.
“And so in life or death situations they can use a chokehold. But we don’t train in them,” he said. “But in that same situation they can use their taser, they can use their gun, they can use their baton, they can use a crowbar on the ground, they can use their vehicle.”
McGuigan said the tribes can take their concerns to the Law Enforcement Officers Standards and Training Commission, which meets four times a year.
Also opposing the bill was the South Dakota Highway Patrol, represented by Assistant Superintendent Jason Ketterling. He told the commission that law enforcement officers already interact and cooperate with tribes.
“We recently and frequently have annually participated in that powwow down at the Crow Creek Indian Reservation down there as well,” Ketterling said.
In response Representative Bordeaux expressed frustration.
“I’m in my eighth year here, and they haven’t changed their Crow Creek story once,” he said. “There’s nine tribes here.”
Bordeaux said the testimony of opponents showed how little state law enforcement understands about tribes.
The committee voted to kill the bill.
