KVIG Informative

Herman Moody patrolled Las Vegas for 31 years and trained the Black officers who came after him, yet he retired in the same rank he started in. Nearly a half-century later, the department he helped integrate still employs Black officers at a lower share than Clark County’s Black population — a gap that traces back to the limits placed on Moody from his very first shift.

The old City of Las Vegas Police Department, which predated the 1973 merger that created the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, hired Herman Moody in 1946, according to an interview Moody gave in 1976 and an oral history recorded by UNLV Libraries Special Collections. No police academy existed at the time, and officers had to supply their own gun and uniform, Moody said in that 1976 interview. A white police inspector had pushed to hire him, arguing the growing city needed Black officers, Moody said.

The assignment came with limits. Moody said he worked mostly alone, without a partner, and was confined to areas where Black residents lived and socialized; he could not arrest white residents under the department’s practice at the time, according to the oral history UNLV recorded with Greg McCurdy, a family associate interviewed by historian Claytee D. White on Aug. 31, 2013, for UNLV’s “African American Experience in Las Vegas” project. With no academy to train him, Moody bought his own Nevada law books and taught himself to write arrest reports that would hold up in court, he said in the 1976 interview.

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About three years after he was hired, in 1949, Moody became the department’s first Black motorcycle officer, according to his 1976 interview. He went on to work narcotics, theft and fugitive details, making detective, but as his responsibilities grew, his rank did not. Moody said he passed the department’s promotional exams more than once, but the eligibility lists expired before his turn came up, and he came to believe the department was not ready to put a Black officer in a supervisory rank over white subordinates.

When the city and county merged their police forces into the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in 1973, Moody held badge No. 2 and was the new agency’s second most senior officer, according to his daughter, Tracey Hayes. He spent several nights a week training newly hired Black officers at his own home, using the same law books he had bought decades earlier to teach himself, Moody said in his 1976 interview.

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The UNLV oral history complicates the simplest version of Moody’s story. In it, Greg McCurdy tells historian Claytee White that it is sometimes disputed whether Moody was truly the department’s first Black officer — but that Moody was, specifically, the first one who lasted. McCurdy describes Moody’s approach as a form of community policing built on getting to know the people in his patrol area and building their trust, years before that style had a name.

Moody retired in 1977 after 31 years, still assigned to the Fugitive Detail and still holding the same non-supervisory detective assignment he had worked for years — the department’s most senior officer at the time of his departure. The Clark County Commission honored his career with a formal proclamation at the Commission Chambers in February 2022, presented by Commissioner William McCurdy II during Black History Month; Metro gave him a police escort to headquarters, where staff displayed his old duty belt, log book and photographs. Moody died Feb. 25, 2023, at his longtime home in the Historic Westside. He was 98.

Department-wide, Black employees made up 10% of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s workforce, civilian staff included, according to the agency’s own 2020 annual report — compared with 14.4% of Clark County’s population reporting as Black alone, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Eight decades after the department confined Moody to Black neighborhoods and never promoted him past the rank he started in, the force he spent 31 years integrating still doesn’t look like the county it polices.