A lot is happening with police in Las Vegas these days.
Just a month ago, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department lost a month-long battle over body-cam footage from the October 1 shooting.
So far this year, in 20 weeks, 67 people have been murdered in the police department’s jurisdiction - about three per week. Not counting the 58 killed on Oct. 1, 2017, 141 people were murdered a year ago.
Is the murder rate going up?
“It has been a difficult year for that again,” Metro Undersheriff Kevin McMahill told KNPR's State of Nevada.
He said to date there have been 53 murders in Metro's jurisdiction, which is nearly the same as last year at this time.
“This year we tend to see a bit higher effort in the domestic violence homicide as well as the gangland disputes that we’ve been talking about for a long period of time,” he said.
McMahill admits it can be a difficult problem to get “arms around."
The number doesn't include the 58 murders from October 1 and McMahill said the department didn't intentionally try to omit that number when submitting information to the FBI. He said the report should have included an asterisk, similar to what Orlando Police did after the Pulse nightclub shooting, but that is not what happened.
The October 1 shooting still resonates through the community and the police department. McMahill said hundreds of officers have asked for and received help from the employee assistance service set up after the shooting.
“There is no doubt that the men and women of Metro were certainly affected by the events of that day, but we also know that hundreds of victims and 22,000 people were there and then really the community as a whole.”
The community keeps learning more about the events of that night. Metro recently had to release statements and body camera footage from that night.
The department fought the request by several media companies to release the information.
McMahill defended that effort. He said there is a “tremendous” amount of video that had to be combed through before being released. They were also worried about re-victimizing the thousands of people who were there. Plus, he said there were privacy concerns and detectives had to search through the video to make sure privacy rules were being followed.
Although the department fought to not release the video, McMahill says he’ll be happy when all the video is released because it will show what the department did that night.
“I will be very happy when this release is complete because what you will find after all of the critics have said that we have covered up and we have lied and we have done all of these things that you will find out that absolutely not a single ounce of that information is true. We never lied and we never covered anything up,” he said.
Sheriff and police departments around the country have asked Metro to talk to them about the shooting and their response.
McMahill said he has already talked to four or five different departments around the country. He said there were some unique things about the shooting that other department can learn from, including how reports about other shooters and multiple crime scenes continued to roll in even after the shooting had stopped.
Metro had to dispatch teams of officers to all of those reports to figure out what was going on because even the top brass thought the attack was a multiple shooter attack at several places along the Las Vegas Strip.
Metro’s experience on Oct. 1 certainly informed its response to an apparent shooter at the Boulevard Mall earlier this month. It turned out that the man in the mall was carrying a fake gun.
Some people have criticized Metro for sending out to so many officers on a threat that turned out to be nothing.
“The reality is had he been shooting in that mall you would have needed darn near every officer that you could possibly muster up to get there. It would’ve been another major incident,” he said.
McMahill also addressed the issue that is a back in the national consciousness: school safety.
“The interesting thing to me is that after 22 school shootings we haven’t done anything yet,” he said.
He said he doesn’t like that people are holding on so tightly to their position on the issue of guns that dialogue about common sense solutions can’t get off the ground.
“Absolutely has to have leaders from all walks of government and private citizens come together and let’s agree on some solutions that we can all implement immediately to save the lives of our kids,” he said.
Kevin McMahill, undersheriff, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
