KVIG Informative

A string of police shootings pushed Las Vegas’ police department to ask the federal government to examine how its officers used deadly force. That 2012 review built the reporting habit the department still leans on today to track, and publicize, how often officers fire their weapons. Las Vegas police reported 10 officer-involved shootings in 2023, below the department’s own five-year average, according to LVMPD’s Office of Internal Oversight and Constitutional Policing. The federal review that reshaped how those numbers get counted and released started because 2011 looked nothing like that.

Officer-involved shootings by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers peaked at 25 in 2010, according to a 2013 assessment prepared for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services by researchers George Fachner and Steven Carter.

LVMPD asked the COPS Office to review its use-of-force practices following a string of shootings in 2011, according to a Nov. 15, 2012, Justice Department announcement. The resulting assessment took eight months, drew on interviews with 95 stakeholders — including community members, officers, prosecutors and union officials — and examined five years of deadly-force incidents, the announcement states. It produced 75 findings and recommendations.

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The department had already acted on roughly half of those recommendations by the time the Justice Department released its findings, according to the same 2012 announcement. The recommendations covered the department’s use-of-force review board, tactics for multi-officer crime scenes, and a push toward new technologies including body cameras, the announcement states.

A follow-up review, then a five-year watch

A follow-up assessment published in September 2013 — titled “Collaborative Reform Model: Six-Month Assessment Report of the Las Vegas Police Department” — found LVMPD had completed 56 of the Use of Force Review Board’s recommendations and made progress on 15 more, according to the report. The same report credited the decline in shootings to several factors together: a newly created Critical Incident Review Team, a Reality-Based Training Program, the restructured Use of Force Review Board, the federal assessment itself, and heightened public attention on the department’s shooting record.

The Justice Department’s COPS Office continued tracking LVMPD’s reforms for two more years under its Collaborative Reform Initiative, producing a final report in 2017 titled “Assessment of the Collaborative Reform Initiative in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department: A Catalyst for Change,” according to the COPS Office’s own program records.

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That reporting habit has outlasted the federal engagement. LVMPD’s Office of Internal Oversight and Constitutional Policing published a five-year use-of-force report in July 2024 covering 2019 through 2023, listing 10 officer-involved shootings in 2023 — a total the department itself described as below its five-year average — and noting supervisors were present at 80% of those incidents, according to the department’s own report.

Nothing in Nevada law compelled a police department to volunteer for federal scrutiny of its own shootings, and nothing requires it to keep publishing the numbers now that the Justice Department has moved on to other cities. LVMPD does it anyway, every year, because the 2012 review turned public accounting into department policy instead of a one-time fix.