Mayor Pledges to Resolve Rapid City, S.D., Racial Problems Story-Date: 07:32 a.m. PST Sunday , September 7, 1997 Mayor Pledges to Resolve Rapid City, S.D., Racial ProblemsIndian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News RAPID CITY, S.D.--Sep. 8--With news cameras following, concerned parents of Lakota/Dakota/Nakota (LDN) youth walked into Rapid City Mayor Jim Shaw's reception area Aug. 29 and asked to speak to him about civil rights -specifically, how young people are being treated by police. A recent incident of alleged police brutality involving a 17-year-old boy precipitated the meeting, but a petition had already been circulating before that. The petition by residents around the North Rapid communities of Lakota Homes and Sioux Addition aims to get a fact-finding committee set up to look into the behavior of the police department's Gang Task Force. ``There are a number of concerns and complaints of possible civil rights violations which include incidents of verbal, physical and emotional abuse of community members by the current, assigned Task Force members,'' the petition states. The night before a peaceful Aug. 29 rally outside the City/School Administration Building, Antoinette Red Woman and other members of the Seven Council Fires women's group had prayed. Holding the sacred pipe as she spoke before a television camera, she said the group ``is approaching the mayor on a spiritual basis.'' ``The brutal mentality toward our people is just uncalled for,'' said Ms. Red Woman, who is Northern Cheyenne and Oglala, moved to Rapid City from Denver four years ago, and said she is ``appalled at the behavior of people in this town, how they treat Lakota people with disrespect, disregard as a human.'' ``We're tired of this. This is our home. We live here, we work here, we pay taxes, we shop here.'' One aunt of a 17-year-old was upset enough to file a complaint against the police department, based on what her nephew told her about what happened to him the morning of Aug. 27. Sheryl Lu said she was called at about 3 a.m. by a sister who said that her nephew, Ricky Jackson, needed to be taken to the hospital. ``He had a large-size lump on his head on the left side and a knot above his ear area.'' He told his aunt, ``I can't believe they beat me up, I didn't do anything wrong.'' Ricky said that he and a nephew were walking in Sioux Addition and some guys were chasing them, so they ran through the field toward his aunt's house. Then they saw some lights behind them, so they split up and climbed a barbed wire fence, then walked a short distance. ``I felt a hit in the back of my head,'' which knocked him down, he said. One police officer was there in a uniform, and another man in plain clothes, the boy said. ``I asked him why he hit me, what did you do that for, and he said he had to, because it looked like I was going to run.'' According to Ricky, the men, who didn't identify themselves as police officers, took his shirt off, looking for gang markings. Ms. Lu later showed a reporter her nephew had no gang markings. ``I kept saying I just want to go home,'' Ricky said. Police did not arrest the youth, but allegedly told him he was trying to resist arrest. They dropped him off at his aunt's house. ``The focus is on attacking gang members,'' Ms. Red Woman acknowledged of the Gang Task Force, ``but they're throwing everyone together into one big group.'' Others among the group brought stories of rough treatment by city police they said occurred in the past few years. Kay Allison, 54, said she was pulled from her car, pushed around and handcuffed in July, 1995 before police released her, claiming to have mistaken her for a niece who was charged with aggravated assault. ``She doesn't have a car,'' Ms. Allison said, ``and she doesn't look like me.'' Gina Johnson's mother, Linda, was also present. The 13-year-old was walking on Milwaukee Avenue after curfew one night when police allegedly ``slammed her face against the trunk,'' fracturing a tooth that later had to be removed, her mother said What especially concerned some of the citizens was an Oct. 1996 editorial in the Rapid City Journal by Police Chief Tom Hennies in which the chief said, ``I am unable to find any improper conduct on the part of any of my officers, `` on any charges that were made by a group called the Alliance of Native Americans. The concerned group of 12 people who gathered Aug. 29 accomplished an impromptu hearing with the mayor, who agreed to meet with them again in more detail. Several in the group said they had voted for the mayor in the last election because he had pledged to improve Indian-white relations. Myron Rock, an elder with the LDN group, spoke for the group in the mayor's conference room, asking to ``work together as a community instead of against each other.'' Mr. Rock said he was concerned that the Gang Task Force is labeling the youth as belonging to gangs and the parents as gang leaders. ``That's a fallacy. Some do, some don't.'' He asked for a fact-finding committee to be comprised of elders, other adults and youth from the American Indian community and other citizens appointed by the mayor. The committee would schedule hearings at the Oyate Center, Lakota Homes, Mother Butler Center and other places, and ``look into possible civil rights violations including incidents involving verbal, physical and emotional abuse of the Indian community.'' ``We can't tolerate this anymore. We are citizens of the United States,'' said Mr. Rock. The mayor said he would be ``certainly happy to look into the concerns. I appreciate the attitude of trying to find a solution,'' Mr. Shaw said. ``There are so many times where there are problems or situations that develop and people form sides for or against, but sometimes we don't look at what's the solution. So it sounds like this is a way to arrive at that.'' Regarding the complaint made by Ms. Lu against the police department about treatment of her nephew, Captain Craig Tieszen of the Rapid City Police Department said it will be investigated. ``I can't tell you any more than that right now, it'll probably take some time. But we will acknowledge that we have received it, and we will investigate it as we do all complaints of that nature.'' Information about the incident cannot be released to the press, Cpt. Tieszen said, because the subject is a juvenile. He did offer to have the captain in charge of the Gang Task Force to talk to a reporter at a later date when he would be in the office. Ms. Red Woman had told the mayor that her people are ``tired of being brutalized. It's very, very wrong.'' Ms. Lu added that she is not against police arresting a person for a crime, but said it is wrong for juveniles and others to be physically harmed unjustly. ``We certainly, from a police department point of view, don't tolerate that kind of behavior at all, and if something like that occurs, we want to find that out,'' answered the mayor. Fox Channel 7, South Dakota Public Radio, and Indian Country Today reporters filed out of the room with the relatives, who planned to circulate their petition for two weeks and bring it back to the mayor. Ms. Red Woman said that the pipe was shaking as she spoke before the television camera. ``It knows we were speaking the truth.'' Hazel Bonner, program director of the Youth Development Program at the Mother Butler Center, who helped organize the petition drive, said she regards the native youth of the area as ``good kids who have been given very little opportunity to succeed in the system.'' She said she asked police to see, but was refused, lists of who police have identified as actual or prospective gang members. She suspects that most kids on the list are wrongly accused. ``Labeling them (as gang members) is the worst thing we can do to our youth,'' she said. ``The greatest solution to juvenile crime is to give them a sense of well-being and a sense that society values them.'' ----- Visit Indian Country Today on the World Wide Web at http://www.indiancountry.com/ ----- (c) 1997, Indian Country Today, Rapid City, S.D. Distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News. ------------------------------------------------------------