KVIG Informative

Every four years, Clark County voters elect the same kind of office the Nevada Legislature created when it carved the county out of Lincoln County in 1909: a sheriff who answers directly to voters, not to a mayor or a city council. That same elected sheriff’s office still sits atop the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department today, and voters just renewed it for another term.

The Nevada Legislature detached the southern portion of Lincoln County and created Clark County through Chapter 11 of the 1909 Nevada Statutes, according to the Legislature’s own published statutes. Section 1 of that chapter erected the new county from the territory lying south of the 3rd standard parallel south of the Mount Diablo base line; Section 2 designated the City of Las Vegas as the county seat.

The act was approved Feb. 5, 1909, and Clark County was formally organized that July 1, according to the 1909 Statutes of Nevada. Charles Corkhill served as the new county’s first sheriff, from 1909 to 1911, according to “The Sheriffs of Clark County,” a roster compiled by the Metropolitan Police Museum Association of Nevada.

Nevada law made the county sheriff an elected office chosen by voters, a structure now codified in Nevada Revised Statutes 248.010, which sets the sheriff’s term at four years and requires election by the qualified electors of their respective counties.

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The sheriff’s office Corkhill held remained a standalone county agency for more than six decades. The Nevada Legislature merged the Las Vegas Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff’s Department into a single Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department effective July 1, 1973, through Senate Bill 340, according to LVMPD’s own published history. The bill’s drafters kept the position elected rather than appointed, reasoning that an elected department head would answer directly to the public rather than to political pressure, the department’s history states.

That elected structure is still how Clark County heads its police department. The county sheriff serves a four-year term and doubles as LVMPD’s top official, according to Clark County’s own elections office. Sheriff Kevin McMahill, sworn in Jan. 2, 2023, won election to a full term in 2026 — the same elected office the 1909 Legislature attached to a county that didn’t yet have paved streets.

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Clark County has grown to more than 2.4 million residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 population estimate, while Lincoln County — the county the 1909 Legislature cut it from — has fallen to about 4,320. One county now holds more than 99 percent of the population the two once shared, and it still elects its police department’s leader the same way the smaller one did the year they split.