KVIG Informative

Nevada put its first paid highway patrolman on the road on June 23, 1923, a single officer answering to the state highway department. It took until 1949 for the Legislature to formally organize a statewide patrol division, and until 2021 for the state to rename that division the Nevada State Police. A century after that first hire, personnel records the department has released show close to a third of its trooper positions in the Las Vegas area sitting empty.

Nevada created a state police force in 1908 to provide a state-level law enforcement presence during labor strikes in the state’s mining communities, according to the Nevada State Police’s own published history. That early agency was called the Nevada State Police, a name the state would return to more than a century later.

On June 23, 1923, the Nevada Highway Department hired the state’s first highway patrolman, working under the supervision of that state police inspector, according to the department’s own history page. By 1934, the patrol had grown to three officers, one each stationed in Reno, Carson City and Las Vegas, driving silver patrol cars marked with gold stars on the door and equipped with red lights and sirens, the department’s history says.

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The patrol was folded into the state police during a 1943 reorganization, according to the department’s history. The 1949 Nevada Legislature then created the Nevada Highway Patrol as its own division, consolidating the old Nevada State Police with inspectors from the Nevada Public Service Commission and the Nevada Department of Taxation, effective July 1, 1949, the department’s history says. The Legislature moved the patrol again in 1957, placing it inside the newly created Department of Motor Vehicles; the agency was renamed the Department of Motor Vehicles and Public Safety in 1985, and the patrol became a division of the standalone Nevada Department of Public Safety in 2001, according to the same history.

In 2021, the Nevada Department of Public Safety renamed the Nevada Highway Patrol the Nevada State Police, reviving the name the state had used for its original 1908 force, according to the department’s own announcement of the change. Officers today are still commonly called troopers, and the division still handles highway enforcement, but its formal name today is Nevada State Police, not Nevada Highway Patrol.

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Personnel records the Nevada Department of Public Safety released under a public records request show a 33 percent vacancy rate among trooper positions assigned to Las Vegas-area highways, with roughly 344 troopers assigned to valley highways as of the records. The vacancy rate a year earlier stood at 45 percent, with roughly 191 trooper positions unfilled in the Las Vegas Area Command, the records show. William Sousa, director of UNLV’s Center for Crime and Justice Policy, said the hiring process itself contributes to the shortage, pointing to lengthy background checks followed by psychological and physical exams applicants must pass before being hired. State lawmakers approved a 23 percent pay raise for troopers in 2023, followed by additional 3 percent raises in both 2024 and 2025, in response to the vacancies.

More than a century after Nevada put a single patrolman on the road to answer a state-level policing need, the successor agency carrying two of that force’s old names is trying to answer a version of the same problem: putting enough troopers on Nevada’s highways to do the job the state created the position to do in the first place.