Overview
A YEAR-LONG INVESTIGATION In the wake of two controversial officer-involved shooting deaths in the summer of 2010, the Las Vegas Review-Journal set out to analyze two decades of shootings by officers from the Las Vegas Valley’s five major law enforcement agencies: the Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas police departments, the Nevada Highway Patrol and Clark County School District police. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department uses deadly force at a higher rate than many other urban police agencies.The newspaper obtained police reports, coroner’s inquest transcripts, civil and criminal court files and other records. It interviewed police officers, relatives of those who have died and experts in police training and administration. Each police shooting in the region — 378 since January 1, 1990; 142 resulting in death, 114 resulting in known wounds — is reflected in this e-book and in a searchable online database, with original documents and, in some cases, videotaped re-enactments by police, linked in a permanent public archive. While information about all five police agencies was analyzed, the focus of the Review-Journal investigation was the Metropolitan Police Department, Nevada’s single largest law enforcement agency with 2,700 officers policing 1.3 million people. Las Vegas police were involved in 309 shootings in the more than 20 years surveyed. Until now, debate has focused on individual incidents rather than systemic issues that help determine when, where, how and why shootings happen. What the newspaper found was an insular department that is slow to weed out problem cops and is slower still to adopt policies and procedures that protect both its own officers and the citizens they serve. It is an agency that celebrates a hard-charging police culture while often failing to learn from its mistakes. Nowhere is the problem more obvious than in the workings of the department’s Use of Force Review Board, a panel of officers and civilians that cleared more than 97 percent of the more than 500 cases of shootings and other officer use of force incidents it has reviewed since 1991.
