What is the role of the South Dakota Department of Public Safety?
To keep South Dakota a safe place to live, work, visit and raise a family. To meet this mission, the Department will cooperate, coordinate and communicate with partner agencies at the state, local, tribal and federal levels to provide public safety services for South Dakota. The Department has a number of duties it is expected to perform: law enforcement, public safety communications, highway safety, traffic crash record keeping, driver licensing, regulatory inspection services, emergency medical licensing and certification, fire training and investigation, emergency preparedness and hazard mitigation, and most recently, homeland security. The agencies in the Department responsible for these tasks know that the safety and security of our citizens are the result of their labor; and with that in mind, each agency understands that they must work as a team. They also know that it is imperative to involve the public, private business and the media in these safety efforts.
