The fall and early winter of 2014 will always be remembered as the time when police violence against young black men boiled to the surface of the national consciousness. The tragic deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner became symbols of an epidemic of violence that has simmered in America for a very long time. Many of us in South Dakota watched the furor of marches and riots on television and, though we were concerned for our nation, did not feel personally touched by the deaths in far off Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY. For me, that all changed on the night of December 20th, 2014, when Allen Locke was shot by a policeman in the doorway of his Rapid City home. Allen had worked for us at Wild Idea Buffalo Company for only short time. I did not know him well. He was a big, quiet guy that we had recently hired to help process buffalo meat. He was married with three children. He’d had some trouble with the law. He was working to get his life back in order. In a lot of ways he was like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and a host of other kids trying to find their way in life. But he wasn’t a black kid. He was Lakota. One of the ironies of what happened on December 20th was that, in coordination with other groups around the country, about one hundred Rapid City residents held an anti-police brutality rally in support of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Of course, in addition to their support of Brown and Garner, their rally was aimed at the relationship between local police and the Lakota people of western South Dakota. It was at that rally that Allen Locke started drinking. Over the years I have had a lot of Lakota friends and I know that they often get unfair treatment from the police. But I really never grasped their relationship with law enforcement until one day when I was driving with Shane Brown, a Lakota guy from the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation that I’d known for years. We were driving toward the Rosebud Reservation and Shane had already pointed out a couple of times that I was driving too fast. I was only going a few miles per hour over the speed limit, but he was nervous and I chided him a little. “Relax,” I said. “We haven’t passed a car for fifteen miles.” Just then we topped a hill and there sat a highway patrolman with his radar gun aimed right at us. “Damn,” I said. It struck me as funny that Shane had warned me just a minute before. But when I looked over at Shane I saw that he found no humor in our situation, he frozen in his seat – as still as a jackrabbit beneath a soaring eagle. I was pleasant to the patrolman and when he took my license and registration back to his car I looked at Shane. I was hoping that he would at least tease me, but he didn’t even let his eyes meet mine. When the patrolman returned he handed me a warning ticket and told me to slow it down. “Have a nice day,” he said. We were miles down the road before Shane spoke. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he said, “he didn’t even shake us down.” According to the police account, Allen Locke’s wife called the police because Allen had been drinking and she was afraid for herself and the three kids. They say that, when the young, white policeman approached the house, Allen …