Daniel Hernandez
December 04, 2015
Stop in the name of accountability and well-reasoned
police practices. (Reuters/David Becker)
One night in June 2010, Las Vegas police knocked on
the door of a man named Trevon Cole, a marijuana dealer who they believed they
had a warrant to arrest. No one answered the door so the police raided the
apartment with weapons drawn. Cole was in the bathroom flushing his marijuana
down the toilet, and according to the detective who found him, he lunged at the
officer—a claim contradicted by physical evidence gathered after the officer
used deadly force.
Cole was killed even though he was unarmed. It would
be a record year for officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas, and Cole’s death
was one of several high-profile incidents which led to calls to reform what
seemed to be a trigger-happy police force.
As it turned out, Las Vegas Metro wasn’t even
pursuing the right Trevon Cole that night. The man they carried a warrant for
had a longer criminal history, a different age and physical description.
Just a few months later in a similar case of
mistaken identity, Metro officers shot an unarmed Gulf War veteran whose car
closely resembled one used in an alleged burglary. The man suffered from
paranoia and PTSD, and he refused to exit his car even when police had it
surrounded.
Experts would cite both of these cases as examples
of “poor training, a lack of clear policies, and an unwillingness to discipline
problem officers” in a six-part investigative series titled, “Deadly Force:
When Las Vegas Police Shoot, and Kill,” by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Now, five years later, the department is a model for
police reform. Despite an uptick in violence directed toward Vegas cops, there
were zero deadly force incidents involving unarmed suspects in 2014. The number
of officer-involved shootings has dropped significantly as well.
In recent months, members of the NYPD, Baltimore
police, as well as law enforcement agencies from Utah, Massachusetts,
Albuquerque and even Australia have visited Metro to study its new training and
accountability regimes.
Here’s how Las Vegas police halted a trend in
excessive force.
Federal scrutiny
When the Las Vegas Review-Journal published its
report on Metro’s history of excessive force, its most damning assessment came
from independent experts who analyzed 20 years worth of Vegas police shooting
data and concluded that most of the deadly force incidents could have been
avoided.
After that, the US Department of Justice launched
its own investigation—a complete audit of the force’s culture, training, and
oversight—in what was then viewed as a test case for federal involvement in
local law enforcement strategies.
The DOJ’s 75 recommendations included ideas that are
now a part of the national conversation on curbing “use of force” abuses by
police. One third of those suggestions had to do with new training concepts,
the most progressive of which was an “inherent bias” class aimed at combating
racially motivated behavior. The vast majority of Metro’s questionable deadly
force incidents happened against unarmed black men.
“Fair and impartial policing” class
In a four-hour training seminar, Las Vegas cops are
now educated on recent studies by social psychologists showing that all humans
are be prone to racial bias. These attitudes are programed in us by personal
encounters, cultural preferences, and media portrayals that become
generalizations and must be consciously ignored.
“When you
become aware that you have these biases, where they are toward a people or a
race or a gender, and you feel that you’re going to act on that bias without
any reason behind your action, you need to put yourself in check.” These
automatic judgments can obviously have a menacing effect on an officer’s
ability to do fair and impartial police work. And though difficult to
eliminate, inherent bias can be managed by deliberately flagging negative
assumptions and adjusting one’s behavior accordingly.
As Captain Matt McCarthy, the man in charge of
Metro’s internal oversight, said in a phone interview with Quartz, “When you
become aware that you have these biases, where they are toward a people or a
race or a gender, and you feel that you’re going to act on that bias without
any reason behind your action, you need to put yourself in check.”
“Reality-based” field training
Metro also changed two key aspects of its officer
field training: It began emphasizing conflict de-escalation and developed new
scenarios based on actual use of force incidents. These “reality-based”
exercises were more complicated and ambiguous than the “predictable” field
exercises that Metro arranged in the past, McCarthy said.
The drills take place in alleys, parking lots, and
apartment units, and they may involve potential carjackings or burglaries with
suspects who run away or fight back. The true-to-life event is recreated right
up to the trigger-point. The officers decide if, or how much, force is
necessary. And once they finish, a training officer critiques that decision.
“Why did you draw your side-arm instead of the Taser?” for example, or, “How
come you didn’t assure the suspect you weren’t going to shoot him when he
expressed fear that you would?”
So to a greater extent than ever before, Vegas cops
are now learning rhetorical techniques to calm situations that once reached
tragic boiling points.
The DOJ wrote in its report that Metro’s training
process was “inconsistent” and hurried to “get training done and out of the
way” to keep cops on the street. Now, officers spend extra time in classrooms
and doing field exercises, where they engage in more serious work.
Body-worn cameras
In 2013, Las Vegas became the first big city to
conduct a pilot program for body-worn cameras on police. Some lawmakers
expressed concerns that the gadgets were too expensive, the technology
unproven, and the footage an invasion of privacy, yet thus far the program is
considered a success.
Body cam footage allowed the department to fire an officer
who beat up a woman suspected of loitering as a prostitute. (She had tossed
aside a cup of coffee in a way the cop perceived as defiant.) In the past, that
officer might have lied about the circumstances behind the woman’s arrest, but
instead he became the first officer in the country charged with a crime for
behavior recorded while wearing a body camera.
Police have been vindicated by the footage as well.
On one occasion, an officer attempted to de-escalate a tense conversation with
a man who ultimately pulled out a gun and opened fire. The subsequent shootout
ended with that officer’s partner shot, and the driver killed. It was through a
review of the body-worn camera footage that the department, the public, and the
perpetrator’s family confirmed that deadly force was justifiable.
A culture of accountability
None of these initiatives would be entirely
effective, however, if officers continued to enjoy a culture of impunity.
According to the Review-Journal, before Metro’s reform process, a staggering
97% of deadly force incidents were validated by the department’s Use of Force
Review Board.
Since then, Metro has shown a renewed willingness to
punish, fire, and even prosecute problem officers. The Use of Force Review
Board has been shuffled to allow its civilian representatives to out-vote
members of the department.
McCarthy said, “The process that we have today is
more accountability-driven than it’s ever been.”
The investigative process for fatal police
shootings, a coroner’s inquest, was once labeled a “cop-clearing circus” by
victims’ families. Now, McCarthy noted, when these investigations take place,
an advocate for the decedent’s family participates in the fact-finding mission
as the public’s ombudsman. The victim’s family can thus make sure its concerns
are answered in a way that informs the punitive process.
All that aside, Metro still has progress to make
before it achieves every goal the DOJ laid out in 2014. Tod Story, the
executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, told Quartz that, like many American
police forces, Metro doesn’t accurately represent its city’s diversity.
Clark County is almost 30% Hispanic, yet Latinos
make up only 11% of area law enforcement. Story said Metro needs to hire more
Spanish-speaking officers, more people of color—especially for patrols in
minority communities. The department is attempting to recruit Latinos through
trips to majority-Hispanic high schools and with ads on Spanish-language radio
stations. But the response so far has been tepid.
Beyond that, the ACLU is cautiously optimistic that
Las Vegas’s police reform effort is succeeding.
“I think what happened in the police department here
is they said, ‘This is it. This can’t go on anymore. We’re under the spotlight
and the community is fed up so we have to do something different.’ That’s the
path we’re on now,” Story said.
“There’s still plenty of skepticism,” he added. “We
are taking the trust-but-verify approach. But because the old way is no longer
acceptable, we’ve all come together to say there has to be something new—there
has to be a better way of doing this—and that’s what everyone is committed to.”
We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
