KVIG Informative

The framework Las Vegas police still use to investigate their own shootings — a critical incident review process, mandatory reality-based training, and a use-of-force policy split into separate sections for firearms and less-lethal weapons — traces directly to a federal review the department asked for itself in 2012, after a string of shootings brought unwanted national scrutiny. More than a decade later, that same reform architecture is still the department’s answer whenever an officer fires a weapon in Las Vegas.

Officer-involved shootings by Las Vegas police reached 25 incidents in 2010, according to a later assessment of the department’s reform efforts by the Crime and Justice Institute. After additional shootings in 2011 drew scrutiny, Sheriff Doug Gillespie’s department asked the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, known as the COPS Office, to review its use-of-force practices — a voluntary request rather than a court order or federal mandate.

The review was an eight-month examination that analyzed five years of the department’s deadly-force data and included interviews with 95 area stakeholders — community members, current and former officers, prosecutors and police union officials among them — according to the Justice Department’s own account of the review. Then-COPS Office Director Bernard Melekian announced the findings on Nov. 15, 2012.

The resulting report contained 75 findings and recommendations, including an overhaul of the department’s use-of-force review board, new tactical protocols for responses involving multiple officers, adoption of body-worn cameras and other technology, and a recommendation to split the department’s use-of-force policy into separate, more specific policies covering firearms and less-lethal weapons. The Justice Department noted that Las Vegas police had already acted on roughly half the recommendations before the report’s public release.

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A follow-up assessment by CNA Analysis & Solutions, published in September 2013 under COPS Office sponsorship, found the department had completed 56 of the recommendations from its own Use of Force Review Board and made demonstrable progress on 15 more. CNA’s evaluators pointed to the department’s new Critical Incident Review Team and a Reality-Based Training Program as two of six factors behind a continued decline in shootings.

A five-year assessment by the Crime and Justice Institute — examining the COPS Office’s Collaborative Reform Initiative for Technical Assistance as applied to Las Vegas police, from the program’s June 2014 completion through June 2016 — tracked shootings across the period: 25 in 2010, 18 in 2011, 11 in 2012, 13 in 2013, 15 in 2014 and 16 in 2015, a 36 percent decline from the 2010 peak. By the time that assessment was released, Joe Lombardo had become sheriff and Kevin McMahill undersheriff; the Crime and Justice Institute’s report credited COPS Office Director Ronald L. Davis, Chief of Staff Katherine McQuay and former Chief Noble Wray of the office’s Policing Practices and Accountability Initiative with overseeing the federal side of the process.

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None of these changes were imposed by a court consent decree or a federal monitor with subpoena power — Las Vegas police designed and adopted their own oversight architecture, then invited outside reviewers to check the results against the department’s own numbers. That voluntary structure, not a judge’s order, is still what determines how the department investigates the next time one of its officers fires a weapon.