Sioux Falls’ new police chief: City ‘hungry’ for new, innovative solutions

By Danielle Ferguson, for Pigeon605

Jon Thum’s greatest preparation for a life in law enforcement came from behind the Hy-Vee meat counter.

He spent 10 years interacting with different customers in unpredictable moods every day, working alongside people with a variety of backgrounds and learning how to maximize a team’s skills and time: all key components for his newest job as the chief of the Sioux Falls Police Department.

“If I could make every cop work a job in the service industry for a couple years, I would,” Thum said. “The daily interaction with customers – sometimes they’re happy; sometimes they’re upset – each situation requires a navigation of customer-service skills.”

Thum officially started as police chief July 26. As he sat in his new office a few days later, he reflected on the upcoming challenges and opportunities in his new role.

He wants to focus on building relationships and getting the community involved in societal based issues that could benefit from new ideas for solutions. He is hoping to fill open positions across the ranks of the department with qualified officers who want to help Sioux Falls. He spoke matter-of-factly about the need to diversify the department, saying years of distrust between cops and certain communities can’t be fixed overnight.

“Sioux Falls is hungry for something different,” he said. “They don’t want to see the same attempted solution to the same problem. They want to be innovative; they want to try new things. They want to try things that’ll have an impact.”

Thum has known he wanted to go into law enforcement since was a child. Both of his grandfathers were veterans, and his dad was in the Naval Reserve. He saw the service role law enforcement could provide and was drawn to it.

But he didn’t get a badge as quickly as he thought he would.

He went to the University of Sioux Falls to play football – though he chuckles now that he was injured for longer than he played – and pursued a business degree because there was no criminal justice track at the time. He met the woman who would end up being his wife toward the end of his time on campus, and the stability of a typical weekday job was appealing for him as he looked to start his life.

After graduating, he took a sales job. He quickly learned it wasn’t for him.

He told himself he was going to give it a try for two years before he could move on. He wanted to “give it a fair shot,” he said. Almost two years in, both he and his wife decided they didn’t like the jobs they had, and both looked to make changes. She would go back to cosmetology school, and he would pursue a longtime dream of becoming a police officer. On his two-year anniversary, he quit the sales job.

Thum joined the Sioux Falls Police Department as a patrol officer in 2005. Within five years, he joined the SWAT team, where he spent 11 years responding to the most potentially dangerous calls in the city.

For a while, he thought he wanted to be a detective, but after a few denied attempts, he figured his path was to serve on the very streets he grew up on. He sought additional training and became a training officer. After about a year and a half in that role, he passed the sergeant’s exam and returned to a uniformed cop position.

“That’s what I realized I loved most about the job. I loved being a street cop,” he said.

In his first few years as a patrol officer, he was surprised by the city’s diversity. He grew up in the Pettigrew Heights and All Saints neighborhoods and went to public school, but his time patrolling the northeastern side of town showed him a rich diversity in Sioux Falls, he said. He got to know the neighborhood he patrolled, the people living there and learned about different parts of the world from those in his own town. He researched conflict in those residents’ home countries and considered how those conflicts might affect how they interact with police in Sioux Falls.

His new knowledge pushed him to do outreach and orientation with the Multi-Cultural Center and Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota.

“I was always comfortable about having those conversations about police relations,” he said.

When a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot an unarmed 18-year-old Black man there in 2014, the response to and conversation around relationships with police reached Sioux Falls. Thum fell into a community speaking and engagement role because he already had been having conversations with people about how to improve relationships between people of color and their police forces. The discussions came and went into the public spotlight throughout his career, but Thum said it was always something he and others in the department were working on.

He stepped into that community speaking role again during the summer of 2020, when Sioux Falls residents and others responded to the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The outrage across the nation was displayed in Sioux Falls. Thum, a lieutenant at the time, was in charge of overseeing protests. He was proud of the peaceful protest that occurred May 31, 2020, and throughout the day was thinking the riots and violence seen in other towns wouldn’t breach South Dakota’s largest city.

“Then, the rocks started flying,” he said.

Protesters in The Empire Mall parking lot began throwing rocks at police officers and their vehicles.

Thum can be seen in a few media clips from that day. Once, he’s seen behind a wall of citizens attempting to protect police from the rocks. He can be seen in an Argus 911 video allowing a citizen to use the police car microphone to discourage protesters from violence. In another clip, in which gunshots can be heard in the background, he told local media: “We need everybody to go home. Remember that Sioux Falls is a great city full of great people. We need to let this cool down.”

He said that statement is still true today.

“Even after getting pelted with rocks and getting shot at, I think that’s true,” he said. “It’s one of those things – you don’t lose heart for the city. The community came together after that.”

The conversation about the local department’s relationship with people of color in the city continued. Thum joined his old high school classmate Vaney Hariri, co-founder of Think3D Solutions, for a live video conversation about a week after what happened at the mall.

“We’ll never be done working on it,” he said last week. “There’s no utopia where we say all these hundreds of years of societal pressure and damage get repaired overnight.”

During that time, Thum also had to balance daily involvement in the COVID-19 response. He was in the city’s emergency operations center regularly to help dictate the department’s role in navigating the health crisis.

It was exhausting, he said, but he enjoyed being part of looking for solutions.

It’s an attitude he hopes to continue with in his new gig: looking for solutions and looking to his team and the community to help create new ideas to address societal issues such as addiction, untreated mental illness and homelessness.

“We do a good job of catching people, but it doesn’t prevent the actual issue,” he said. “Police deal with symptoms, not causes. How do we band together to make some changes?”

If anyone in the community has any ideas, he said he’d love to hear them. Police are an important part of community relationships and mitigating conversations, he said, but cops can’t come up with every program.

In the meantime, he’s adjusting to more time behind a computer. While his job has shifted to managing the biggest budget ever to cross his desk and will put to use his time in the business field, don’t be surprised if you see him out in the community in his navy blue street uniform.