KVIG Informative

Henderson’s decision to build its own police force the year it became a city is the same choice it has kept for more than seventy years, even as other Nevada communities now study merging their departments into one.

Henderson incorporated as a city on April 16, 1953, according to the City of Henderson’s own account of its founding, “From Water Street a Town Is Born.” Five weeks later, on May 23, 1953, residents elected Dr. Jim French as the city’s first mayor; the city’s history page puts the population at 7,410 at the time.

The new city organized its own police department rather than rely on Clark County for law enforcement. George Crisler served as Henderson’s police chief from 1953 to 1968, according to the Henderson District Public Libraries’ digital photograph archive, which holds dated images from his tenure, including a 1953 photograph of Crisler beside his patrol car and a photograph identified as the swearing-in of Crisler and other city employees around 1954.

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Betty Wagner Daley, who joined the department in 1957, described its earliest years in an oral history recorded for the Henderson Historical Society on April 23, 2013, held by Henderson District Public Libraries. Daley recalled that Crisler had come from Minnesota to take the job and that the department numbered about eight officers when she arrived. She said she was hired after a call from City Manager Don Dawson, who told her the department needed someone to type up officers’ handwritten reports.

According to Daley’s account, the department’s station on Atlantic Street doubled as the city’s jail for male prisoners. Joy Frank was the department’s only policewoman at the time, and Daley recalled her as a skilled markswoman who handled duties Daley later took on herself.

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Daley said she did not wear a uniform until 1960, when she was sworn in as a policewoman by Judge Dohrenwend. The department outgrew the Atlantic Street building, she recalled, and moved into the new Henderson City Hall on Water Street in what she believed was 1964.

Twenty years after Crisler’s tenure as chief ended, Nevada rewrote the rulebook for policing the Las Vegas Valley, merging the Las Vegas police department with the Clark County sheriff’s department to form the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in 1973. Henderson never signed on. More than seven decades after Betty Wagner Daley typed up handwritten reports in a station that doubled as the jail, Henderson still answers to a police chief of its own — not Metro’s.