KVIG Informative

In January 2012, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department agreed to open its use of deadly force to outside federal review, after the agency’s officer-involved shootings climbed well past its own historical average. The sheriff who oversaw that review’s formal conclusion is gone from office, but the successor who spent years carrying its reforms forward now sits in the governor’s office, and Nevada has since written the same transparency question into state law for every police agency in the state.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, known as the COPS Office, mutually agreed in January 2012 to begin a Collaborative Reform Initiative examining the department’s use of deadly force, according to the COPS Office’s own assessment of the process. The department’s officer-involved shootings had reached 25 in 2010, nearly double the 14.6 incidents per year that a later federal assessment calculated as the department’s average for 1991 through 2015.

The COPS Office published its initial assessment in October 2012, identifying 75 reforms and recommendations covering use-of-force policy, the department’s internal shooting-review process, training standards and public reporting on incidents, according to the assessment. Sheriff Doug Gillespie led the department through the initial engagement, according to the same federal review.

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The COPS Office released an interim assessment in September 2013 and a final assessment in May 2014, closing the formal three-stage review under Gillespie’s leadership. Gillespie, who had withdrawn his re-election bid in August 2013, left office in January 2015; Joe Lombardo, who won the 2014 sheriff’s race, succeeded him and inherited responsibility for carrying the reforms forward, according to public county election records and the office of Nevada’s governor.

As sheriff, Lombardo continued implementing the reforms and was re-elected in 2018, according to the governor’s office. A follow-up assessment commissioned by the COPS Office and published by the Crime and Justice Institute in 2017 found that Las Vegas police officer-involved shootings had fallen 36 percent, from 25 in 2010 to 16 in 2015, though it cautioned that the department’s data over the prior two decades showed little long-term change in the annual average.

Lombardo served as sheriff until January 2023, when he was sworn in as Nevada’s 31st governor after winning the November 2022 election, according to the governor’s office.

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Nevada’s Legislature carried the same transparency question the COPS Office had raised in Las Vegas to a statewide level in 2021. Senate Bill 212 added a new use-of-force reporting section to Chapter 193 of the Nevada Revised Statutes, requiring every law enforcement agency in the state — sheriff’s offices, municipal police departments, the Department of Corrections and the Nevada System of Higher Education’s police among them — to report use-of-force data into the state’s Central Repository for Nevada Records of Criminal History, housed at the Department of Public Safety, with the Attorney General’s office compiling the results each year for the governor and the Legislature, according to the bill’s text.

The Central Repository began publishing that data publicly in 2023, and the Nevada Attorney General’s office issued its most recent statewide report on Feb. 1, 2026, showing 97 reportable use-of-force incidents and 13 deaths statewide in 2025, and a drop in fatal incidents involving Las Vegas police from nine in 2024 to three in 2025, according to the Attorney General’s report. The law Nevada passed to answer the same question the Justice Department asked Las Vegas police in 2012 now applies to every badge in the state — including the one the current governor wore while he carried his department’s reforms into their next chapter.