LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — In a room made up of officers and elected leaders, Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill walked out to Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman,’ taking to the rostrum and telling the gang how he’s following up on his marketing campaign guarantees.
“One is that we were going to come in here and kick the [expletive] out of crime,” McMahill stated. “That was maybe not the public way, I was saying it, but it’s what I really meant the entire time.”
In some methods, McMahill’s promise rings true: Homicides, robberies, burglaries, and automobile thefts dropped in 2024 in comparison with the yr earlier than.
The sheriff stated that is carried out via growing policing, injecting humanity into their work, and advancing with expertise.
In the case of growing policing, Metro is increasing its attain within the valley, with a brand new space command coming to the east on Sahara Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, in addition to a substation coming to the northwest in Skye Canyon.
Current police stations are additionally getting a lift. Drones will likely be nested at ten completely different neighborhoods, and tied to license plate cameras and gunshot-recognizing tech. They will fly out mechanically when a criminal offense is detected and could be managed by an officer.
“There’s a lot of critics who say that we’re trying to turn this into a surveillance state. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t want cameras everywhere,” McMahill stated. “Our cameras, our drones, all these things that work through our real-time crime center are designed to respond to any incidents of violence that have occurred.”
Different incoming tech features a fleet of police Cybertrucks, funded by a donor.
Additionally new to the division is the lately opened wellness bureau. Metro’s remedy clinicians see 425 wellness visits monthly. With the brand new bureau, they’re hoping officers and their households get the assistance they want, stopping the worst from taking place.
“The intent behind taking care of our men and women in ways we’ve never taken care of them is, we don’t have to have these kinds of headlines,” McMahill stated, displaying a listing of headlines about officers going through home violence prices, amongst others. “We go back in and do sort of a postmortem on every one of these. We could have interceded at different times.”
The sheriff stated that whereas wellness is a precedence, it doesn’t take the place of accountability for officers.
A part of that accountability is new coaching centered on de-escalation. The division has a purpose of decreasing officer-involved shootings by 50% this yr.
Accountability additionally extends to the general public in McMahill’s speech, citing 160 site visitors deaths in 2024. In the identical yr, Metro Police issued over 121,000 citations. He desires Nevada legislators to approve crimson gentle cameras.
“Writing more tickets did nothing to resolve the fact that our fatal accidents went up,” McMahill stated.
“We’ve got to start tracking what is actually happening with these tickets. This non-criminal aspect of traffic citations was an experiment. If you ask me, [it] has failed. People are not being held accountable, period. Red light cameras are something I’m fighting for regardless of which party you come from because I’m sick and tired of picking people up off the grounds of our streets.”
