by John Hult, South Dakota Searchlight
March 6, 2026
Police in South Dakota logged fewer theft reports in 2025 than the previous year, but made more arrests for theft.
The figures suggest surveillance technology first adopted in Madison and expanded last year to Sioux Falls can make it easier to find suspects, its supporters say.
Madison Police Chief Justin Meyer said the city’s automated license plate readers, which take static images of license plates and run them against databases of reported crimes, have been “an invaluable tool” since the city installed them in 2022.
“We have been able to clear a number of retail thefts where we wouldn’t have been able to before,” said Meyer, who shared his department’s success stories with Sioux Falls officials as that city considered purchasing the readers.A license plate reader is affixed to a traffic light pole in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. (Courtesy of Sioux Falls Police Department)
In Sioux Falls, the license plate readers are part of an integrated Real Time Information Center where a team coordinates responses from detectives and patrol officers with the help of the license plate images and the crimes associated with them, as well as footage from the city’s network of traffic cameras.
At a media briefing on crime trends in Sioux Falls recently, Sioux Falls Police Chief Jon Thum and other city officials trumpeted a five-year low in per capita crime rates.
Drops in burglary, stolen vehicle and other theft cases were a focal point, but Chief Thum also pointed out that the information center, launched last year, has helped police solve hundreds of crimes and establish the cause of 124 traffic crashes.
“One of our highlights is our proactive enforcement efforts, which contribute to some of the success that we’ve seen,” Thum said.
Fewer reports, more arrests
Crime in South Dakota 2025, a publication of Attorney General Marty Jackley’s office, was released recently. The publication is built from data on calls for service and arrests reported by policing agencies across the state. It does not include crimes reported in tribal areas.
The 2025 report’s marquee figure was a 6.2% drop in reported crimes, with decreases in most offense categories. It’s the largest year-over-year drop in crime in at least five years and a continuation of a downward trend since 2023.
The report also shows an improved clearance rate for nonviolent crimes. The clearance rate is the percentage of reported crimes solved through an arrest. Nationwide and in South Dakota, clearance rates for property crime are generally lower than they are for violent crime overall, though clearance rates for rape tend to be the lowest of any specific offense. A graphic showing reported crimes and arrests in South Dakota from 2022 through 2025, from the South Dakota Attorney General’s “Crime in South Dakota 2025” report. (courtesy South Dakota Attorney General’s Office)
In 2025, the violent crime clearance rate in South Dakota was just under 42%, slightly less than 2024. For property crimes, the 2025 figure was 14%, compared to 11% the year before.
South Dakota police agencies logged around 2,000 fewer property crime calls than 2024, but nonetheless made 200 more arrests for those offenses.
The improvement in clearance rates for property crimes was driven largely by two categories of offenses: general larceny and motor vehicle theft.
There were 1,277 fewer larcenies reported in 2025 than 2024, but 246 more arrests, which bumped the clearance rate in that category by three percentage points.
On the stolen vehicle side, South Dakotans reported 468 fewer incidents in 2025, a drop of 27%. Yet police made almost as many arrests as they had in 2024, moving the clearance rate for stolen vehicles from 12% to 16%.
Arson and burglary are also classified as property crimes. The state had nine more arson reports than 2024 and six more arrests, with a clearance rate of 37%. The rate in 2024 was 31%.
There were 20% fewer burglaries and 20% fewer burglary arrests. The clearance rate stood at just under 13% for both 2024 and 2025.
License plate readers boost arrests in Sioux Falls
Around 70% of all reported crimes in South Dakota originate in two metro areas: Rapid City and Sioux Falls. Changes in reports or arrests on the local level in either area can have an outsized effect on statewide statistics.
Sioux Falls Police Department spokesman Aaron Benson said the agency hasn’t done the granular statistical work necessary to definitively link its new policing technologies to the state’s figures for property crime, but he said the city’s records broadly align with the 2025 report’s findings.
“We are seeing numbers similar to what the state is seeing,” Benson said.
The department placed 25 automated license plate readers, from a company called Flock, on traffic signals around the city last summer. The city council in Sioux Falls approved $168,000 for a contract with Flock in January of 2025.
The devices capture images of license plates, automatically scanning the numbers for plates attached to stolen vehicles, vehicles associated with reported crimes, or with people who have active arrest warrants.
The devices can’t be used for facial recognition, and the data cannot be shared for use in immigration enforcement, according to the Sioux Falls Police Department website and the city’s Flock data portal website.
The systems detected more than 400,000 vehicles in the past month, the data portal says, with more than 2,100 “hot list” hits, meaning the plates or vehicles were tied to incidents listed in the National Crime Information Center, Amber Alerts and to reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.Statistics from the Sioux Falls Police Department’s Real Time Information Center, showing its impact on crimes solved and calls for service cleared. (Courtesy of Sioux Falls Police Department)
The readers, Benson said, have been used in concert with the city’s existing network of traffic light cameras, and have helped officers piece together clues and solve crimes — particularly vehicle thefts — in situations where they’ve struggled in the past.
“Being able to monitor a vehicle as it’s traveling through town until officers can arrest somebody or can safely recover the vehicle after the fact, that’s something we weren’t really able to do until the last few years,” Benson said.
The city’s most recent crime statistics, released at this week’s crime trends press conference, said the city’s real time information center has attended to 559 calls for service, contributing to 64 arrests, 37 of the 40 stolen vehicles recovered since its launch, and to the resolution of 27 cases.
Madison chief says South Dakota has careful approach to surveillance
The Madison Police Department’s Flock website says the city has similar restrictions on data collection and use, but lists dozens of policing agencies in South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota with which it shares data. The 28 cameras in Madison detected more than 35,000 vehicles last month, with 323 “hot list” hits.
Meyer, the Madison police chief, said his city collaborates with Sioux Falls, sharing information back and forth to track suspects using their respective resources. He pointed to several cases solved through that collaboration in recent years, including an ATM theft and the recovery of a kidnapped child.
Worried about surveillance, states enact privacy laws and restrict license plate readers
Meyer said he understands that people worry about surveillance.
“You start using the word surveillance, and I think the general public immediately jumps to Big Brother,” Meyer said, a reference to the surveillance overseer in George Orwell’s book “1984.”
South Dakota famously passed a law barring the state of Iowa from accessing its motor vehicle records to send tickets to South Dakota residents caught speeding by traffic cameras in Sioux City. Sioux Falls dismantled a set of red light cameras following a lawsuit in which a circuit court judge ruled that their use violated due process rights.
More recently, concerns about the reliability and application of rapidly proliferating facial recognition technology have sparked lawsuits nationwide. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed or supported multiple lawsuits over alleged wrongful arrests based on facial recognition technology, and on allegations of overly broad data collection.
This year, a group of plaintiffs filed suit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, alleging that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are photographing them to build a database of agitators and threatening to label them as domestic terrorists.
In Colorado, lawmakers filed a bill to require law enforcement agencies to get a warrant to search Flock data after Denver Police Department logs revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had requested data from that city’s system hundreds of times.
Meyer sees South Dakota’s approach to the license plate readers as one with a lighter touch. The systems aren’t used to issue traffic citations, he said. The images become tools for tracking down more evidence in situations where a vague vehicle description isn’t enough to find a suspect.
“They’re taking hundreds of thousands of photos a month, and we’re doing a very minute number of searches, looking for a specific vehicle for a specific purpose,” Meyers said. “We are not out there watching these cameras 24/7.”
Meyer or another supervisor with the department reviews statistics on searches performed each month, he said, to “make sure we’re not abusing this.”
“Our officers are fully aware of that,” he said. “We haven’t had any instances of abuse. So yes, it’s a great investigative tool, and nothing more.”
Meyer also noted that surveillance from police agencies are only a small part of modern surveillance. The ATM theft case in Madison leaned on surveillance footage from a private citizen, he said, and data collected by smartphones — when those phones are seized and searched by officers — is far more robust than anything police can collect with cameras on traffic lights.
“Your cellphone follows you around everywhere,” Meyer said. “It listens to everything that you say.”
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- March 7, 20261:33 pmEDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated to reflect a correction. An earlier version of the story misstated the venue of a court decision in a red light camera lawsuit.
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.
