Las Vegas police say crime is down in southern Nevada, where two-thirds of the state's population resides.
Police though have been involved in two shootings in January; one man is believed to have committed four murders in the Reno area; and President Trump says that's why the country needs a wall.
At the same time, Las Vegas police and other departments are trying out new gun-mounted video cameras, to go along with body cameras. Why? What do they add to the investigation of situations where deadly force is used?
Discussion Highlights:
What is your assessment of releasing the video and documents from the October 1 shooting?
I think we've had a mixed bag. There are some folks that are upset that we had to release that stuff. I'm talking internally as well as the community as a whole.
I don't know that it answered any other questions that we hadn't already discussed. It certainly displayed a lot of the heroics of not only the officers there but everyday citizens that were there.
Can you say that undocumented immigrants here are committing crimes at a higher rate than others?
No, I can't say that.
We get this question about what it is Metro does with ICE. Just to be 100 percent completely transparent about this, law enforcement pre-incident - car stops, person stops, interactions in the field with police officers and undocumented individuals - we don't ask those kinds of questions.
The only time an individual immigration status becomes part of the record is after they're booked into the Clark County Detention Center we actually participate in what's called the 287G program. That's where individuals that are foreign-born are run through the [Department of Homeland Security] system to determine whether or not they're in the country illegally.
What happens subsequent to that is we notify ICE but none of that occurs until the individual is adjudicated here locally, in other words, whatever criminal charges that they are facing they have to deal with that case within our system.
Before they get out of the Clark County Detention Center, a detainer is placed and ICE will either come and pick them up or not. Today, about 50 percent of the detainers that are placed are picked by ICE.
What is going on right now with officer-involved shootings?
We had 22 officer-involved shootings last year and we had 22 the year prior to that.
In 2010, we had 25. We've gone 16 one year. Sixteen another year. Down as low as 10, nothing has really changed in the officer-involved shooting world other than the fact that we continue to evaluate and learn from every one of those incidents, place it back into training so we can continue to have that focus on reducing those numbers of incidents.
Is there some estimate on how many gangs operate in Metro's jurisdiction?
As of this morning, we have 594 identified gangs, over 12,000 identified gang members.
One of the rules we have to follow is 28 CFR - the Code of Federal Regulation - and that is keeping intelligence databases about these types of individuals. You have to purge this information out if it's not refreshed.
In today's world, a lot of the younger kids that are involved in these gangs they don't affiliate with the gang that may have been associated with red or blue or a particular color. They have this hybridization of gangs... so people who would have normally been mortal enemies because of a particular neighborhood they lived or the people they associated with find themselves together.
A lot of this has to do with the pimping game or running girls as well as the narcotics trade.
We also see a larger influx of individuals that left Southern California, who would have normally never been associated with an individual from the other side that are finding themselves in the same neighborhood.
Metro Police has started working with the survivors of fatal traffic accidents. Why?
One of the things were realized a long time ago was that we weren't focused enough on the victims. Everybody seems to focus on the suspect but when you're a victim of a violent crime it really impacts your life for the rest of your life.
We realized we have a much larger role in helping victims recover from these incidents as well... No matter what, whether your family member was killed at the hands of another from a firearm or a knife or if they're killed at the hands of a drunk driver who is driving and causes a fatal automobile accident. The victimization is the same.
We spend a significant amount of time trying to bring other community partners to this effort so we can better take care of those victims as we move forward.
Metro is doing something similar when it comes to domestic violence victims:
It started out in Northwest Area Command. They had six homicides that year that were domestic violence related, which by the way still leads the categories for causation factors for all homicides.
So, we're trying to do something different. In this case, we partnered with Safe Nest and the Safe Nest volunteers. Police go out to violent domestic violence [call]. They do what they've always done. For years, we had a little blue card that had all of the community efforts that [victims] could go to to get away from [their abuser]. It didn't work.
They took it upon themselves to innovate, to work with existing partners. When a suspect is removed from the home, we have these victim advocates that go out and they walk them through different places to live... often times the person arrested is also the breadwinner, so how are you going to survive? There is a myriad of wraparound services that are provided to those victims and in those cases where those officers have gone out and dealt with those victims, it has been so successful that we have already expanded it one other area command and we're in the process of expanding it to two.
Metro Police tested guns with cameras mounted on them. Is that the latest thing for police officers?
To be honest with you, I don't really understand this technology as well as I probably should.
One of the things I'm troubled by with this mentality of cameras on guns is the only time that that particular camera would activate is when an officer has pulled a gun out of their holster.
I think that advantage of body-worn cameras is we're capturing the interaction from the moment that it begins. They are still limited obviously by what direction the camera is pointed in but the last thing I want is to only have a photograph or a video of after an officer has taken their gun out of their holster and pointed it at an individual.
Undersheriff Kevin McMahill, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
