KVIG Informative

Las Vegas police shot at fewer people in 2025 than in any of the previous five years, according to the department’s own count. That trajectory traces back to a federal review Las Vegas Metro accepted after a news investigation and a civil rights petition arrived within two months of each other in 2011 and 2012.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department recorded seven officer-involved shootings in 2025, according to the department’s own public statements documenting each incident as it happened. The department logged the year’s seventh and final shooting on Dec. 19, 2025, after a traffic-stop pursuit ended with an officer firing after a less-lethal option failed to stop a fleeing man who reached toward his waistband, according to LVMPD’s release on the incident.

That total sits far below where the department stood roughly a decade and a half earlier. The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and the Las Vegas chapter of the NAACP filed a joint petition with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division on Jan. 14, 2012, asking federal investigators to examine LVMPD under the federal pattern-or-practice statute, 42 U.S.C. § 14141, and to consider appointing an independent monitor over the department.

The petition cited 142 people killed in 378 officer-involved shootings between Jan. 1, 1990, and the date of filing, and said LVMPD’s own Use of Force Review Board had ruled in officers’ favor in 497 of 510 cases, a 97 percent clearance rate. It also cited $18 million paid out in settlements since 1991 over excessive-force and wrongful-arrest claims, and said Black residents made up 32 percent of shooting subjects while accounting for less than 10 percent of the local population, according to the petition’s own text as published by the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

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A separate five-part news investigation into the department’s shooting record, published in November 2011, had already drawn public attention to cases LVMPD’s internal review and the Clark County coroner’s inquest process had ruled justified, including the 2010 killing of an unarmed man, Trevon Cole, during a drug raid, according to the Department of Justice’s own account of the review’s origins.

The director of the department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, known as the COPS Office, contacted Sheriff Doug Gillespie directly in January 2012 and offered technical assistance through its Critical Response program. Gillespie accepted, launching what the office called a Collaborative Reform review of LVMPD’s shooting policies, training, tactics and community engagement. The COPS Office published its findings in October 2012 under the title “Collaborative Reform Process: A Review of Officer Involved Shootings in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.”

LVMPD had implemented more than 95 percent of the report’s recommendations by 2013, according to the Department of Justice. The Center for Naval Analyses, working under a cooperative agreement with the COPS Office, published a six-month assessment, then a final assessment in May 2014, and returned in January 2017 with a follow-up report titled “A Catalyst for Change,” according to LVMPD’s own published history of the review.

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The department’s Office of Internal Oversight and Constitutional Policing now publishes an annual use-of-force report tracking every shooting individually. That office’s most recent multiyear report described 2023’s total of 10 officer-involved shootings as already below the department’s five-year average, before the count fell further to seven in 2025, according to LVMPD’s own published figures.

Fourteen years after two civil rights organizations asked the federal government to place an independent monitor over Las Vegas police, LVMPD has never operated under a court-ordered consent decree. It built its own reform program instead, out of a federal review it invited rather than one imposed on it, and it has published a declining shooting count every year since — a standard with no monitor and no court order behind it, resting entirely on the department choosing to keep applying it once nobody outside Metro is still required to check.