South Dakota Police Report: How to Get a Crash Report, Incident Report, or Body Camera Footage

South Dakota is one of only a handful of states where police-filed crash reports are not confidential by default. The South Dakota Codified Laws say so directly: accident reports and the information in them are "not privileged and may not be held confidential." That openness runs through a dedicated online system, safesd.gov, rather than a records request to the investigating agency.

A South Dakota police report actually breaks into two separate channels. A crash report comes from the South Dakota Office of Highway Safety through safesd.gov. An incident report covering a crime, arrest, or general police call comes from the local department or sheriff's office that handled it, under a more discretionary set of public-records rules. Body camera footage in South Dakota has no dedicated access statute at all. This guide covers all three.

Information last verified on 2026-08-10. This article has not yet been reviewed by a licensed lawyer.

Getting a Copy of a South Dakota Crash Report

South Dakota crash reports are ordered through safesd.gov, the South Dakota Office of Highway Safety's online request system (built on the state's sdbuy.primepublicsafety.com platform). Because SDCL 32-34-13 makes crash reports non-confidential, the state does not restrict who can request one the way many other states restrict access to parties and their representatives.

The statute is direct about the confidentiality question. SDCL 32-34-13 provides that "reports pursuant to §§ 32-34-7 to 32-34-12, inclusive, and the information contained in such reports is not privileged and may not be held confidential." South Dakota shares that openness with a small minority of states, including Nevada, New Jersey, Indiana, North Dakota, and New York, against the more common default of confidential-unless-you're-a-party.

Ordering online costs a $4 locate and provide fee plus a $6 online convenience fee, for roughly $10 total. Requesters who prefer to pay by cash, check, or money order can use the mail-in form available on safesd.gov instead. Either way, the request must wait at least 10 days after the date of the crash, and the system needs at least two of the following to locate the report: the crash date, the driver's last name, or the county where the crash happened.

Not every crash produces a report a requester can pull through this system. Safesd.gov will not process requests for crashes on private property, crashes that happened within the last 10 days, crashes invoking South Dakota's Marsy's Law victim-rights protections, or crashes below the state's minimum reporting threshold. Reports themselves are retained for 15 years from the date of the crash.

Because South Dakota's crash reports are not privileged by statute, they still carry personal information about the people involved, driver's license numbers, addresses, and similar data pulled from motor vehicle records. Federal law layers a separate restriction on top of the state's openness: the Driver's Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2721, limits what personal information tied to a motor vehicle record an agency may disclose to a requester outside a statutorily permitted purpose, regardless of how open the underlying state record is.

Getting a Copy of a South Dakota Police Incident Report

An incident report, covering an arrest, a theft, a disturbance call, or any other police response that is not a traffic crash, is not available through safesd.gov. Requests go directly to the records unit of the department or sheriff's office that responded, and South Dakota's public-records framework treats those records differently from the affirmatively non-confidential crash reports above.

SDCL 1-27-1.5 sets out South Dakota's list of records exempt from mandatory inspection and copying. Subdivision (5) covers "records developed or received by law enforcement agencies and other public bodies charged with duties of investigation or examination of persons, institutions, or businesses, if the records constitute a part of the examination, investigation, intelligence information, citizen complaint or inquiry, informant identification, or strategic or tactical information used in law enforcement training." Note what the text does not say: there is no "active investigation" qualifier in the South Dakota provision, so closing a case does not by itself lift the exemption. Two carve-outs written into the same subdivision run the other way and favor requesters. It does not apply to records "relating to the presence of and amount or concentration of alcohol or drugs in any body fluid of any person," and it does not apply to a 911 recording or a transcript of a 911 recording "if the agency or a court determines that the public interest in disclosure outweighs the interest in nondisclosure."

Subdivision (5) is also not the whole framework. It states that "this law in no way abrogates or changes §§ 23-5-7 and 23-5-11," which leaves SDCL 23-5-11 as the more specific provision governing criminal justice records. That statute exempts confidential criminal justice information and criminal history information from disclosure and lets the lawful custodian withhold them. But it also carries the strongest affirmative hook a South Dakota requester has: information, if maintained, "about calls for service revealing the date, time, and general location and general subject matter of the call is not confidential criminal justice information and shall be released to the public," unless that information contains criminal intelligence, identity information that would jeopardize an ongoing investigation, or identity information associated with a mental health or a chemical dependency or abuse intervention. A records unit that will not even confirm the date, time, general location, and general nature of a call is withholding something the statute says shall be released, and citing 23-5-11 by name is the most useful thing a requester can put in writing.

Beyond that mandatory floor, the subdivision (5) exemption is discretionary rather than absolute. A custodian can release all, part, or none of an incident report depending on whether disclosure would interfere with an ongoing matter, and South Dakota's Marsy's Law victim-rights framework can further limit what identifying information about a victim is released.

Because this exemption is applied case by case, expect the response to vary by department and by the sensitivity of the incident. A closed case with no ongoing prosecution is far more likely to be released in full than an open investigation.

Body Camera Footage in South Dakota

South Dakota has no dedicated body-worn camera statute governing when the public can obtain footage. Requests are handled under the same general law-enforcement records exemption at SDCL 1-27-1.5 that covers incident reports, alongside SDCL 23-5-11 for criminal justice information, or under an individual department's own policy where one exists. That means there is no statewide fee schedule, retention floor, or standard timeline to point to, and the outcome depends heavily on which agency recorded the footage and what it involved.

For the broader legal landscape, see How to Request Body Cam Footage and South Dakota Body Camera Laws.

Related Resources

Police Reports by State covers how every state's crash-report and incident-report channels work. See also How to File a Police Report, How to Read a Police Report, Are Police Reports Public?, South Dakota Body Camera Laws, South Dakota Car Accident Laws, South Dakota Public Records Laws, and South Dakota Court Records.

Disclaimer

This article provides general information about how to request police crash reports, incident reports, and body camera footage in South Dakota. It is not legal advice. Fees, portals, and agency practices change; confirm current details directly with safesd.gov, the responding agency, or a South Dakota attorney before relying on anything here for a specific situation.

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Last updated: 2026-08-10. Fees and portals reflect their published status as of August 2026.