Officers under Metro sergeant charged with oppression shared grave concerns to grand jury

On the lookout for people committing crimes, Metropolitan Police Department officers sometimes patrol the Las Vegas Strip in plain clothes, blending in with those around them, according to several officers who took the witness stand in front of a grand jury Oct. 1.

These officers are not meant to interact with anyone, even if they are committing a crime, unless in the case of an emergency, officers said. They’re merely “spotters,” informing uniformed officers when an arrest needs to be made.

Yet one officer, Sgt. Kevin Menon, dressed in plain clothes and unidentifiable as a cop, has been accused of interacting with people on the Las Vegas Strip on several occasions, leading to what his arrest report described as a “pattern of unlawful detentions.”

Five officers who once worked for Menon, including some who ultimately reported Menon’s behavior, shared in testimony recorded in a court transcript that they had concerns about his actions, so much so that officers said they worried one day, Menon’s unprecedented behavior could lead to an officer-involved shooting, or even civil unrest.

On the witness stand, Metro officer Erik Sanchez told the grand jury that he worried about the potential for an officer-involved shooting when Menon, dressed in pain clothes, shoulder-checked a man who had been seen with a knife on a pedestrian bridge.

“It’s going to be difficult to just hit the subject and not someone else,” Sanchez said he remembers thinking, if the interaction escalated. But also, “it was going to be concerning due to the fact that Menon was the one who started the whole incident,” he said.

Sanchez said he got between Menon and the man, who was taken into custody without incident for possessing a knife that was too long to be legal on the Strip. The grand jury Sanchez spoke in front of Oct. 1 indicted Menon on nine counts of oppression under the color of office, one count of oppression with immediate threat or use of physical force, two counts of subornation of perjury, or inducing someone to lie under oath, and one count of battery on a protected person.

Plainclothes operations

Metro officers Justin Candolesas, Stephen Corsaro, Brett Flygare, Abbygail Armijo and Sanchez each took the witness stand Oct. 1. Chief Deputy District Attorney Christopher Hamner and Deputy District Attorney Kenneth Portz questioned the officers, all members of Menon’s “Flex,” squad, a specialized investigative unit charged with identifying and suppressing criminal activity, records show.

Candolesas said that on weekends, the Flex squad did what he caled “Orca-style” operations, in which plainclothes officers spotted individuals, determined reasonable suspicion or probable cause, and informed uniformed officers about it.

Throughout a series of these operations, Menon is accused of bumping into a person with force on a walkway between two Las Vegas Strip hotels, pretending to be a “suspicious person” in order to engage people in conversation before detaining them and shoving a fellow Metro officer, among other actions that amounted to people being unlawfully arrested, police said.

During the shoulder-checking incident on May 3, Candolesas told the grand jury the man Menon had shoulder-checked had been “minding his own business.” From his vantage point, Candolesas said he didn’t see Menon bump into the man but saw the altercation on security camera footage later and was told about it by other officers.

“It sounded like the most illegal thing a sergeant could do,” Candolesas said. The man was arrested on a misdemeanor knife charge.

Corsaro said he learned about the incident from Menon himself, when he allegedly told Corsaro that he had taken that action to shorten the amount of time he’d have to spend following the man and incite a disorderly conduct type situation.

“I was pretty disgusted,” Corsaro said.

Throughout their testimony, each officer said they had never seen another police officer, let alone a police sergeant, conduct themselves the way Menon is accused of doing.

‘A gut feeling that it was wrong’

Armijo said she was the youngest and most junior officer on the squad, which was an achievement. But when she was allegedly instructed to detain people without probable cause by Menon, Armijo said she considered transferring to a different unit.

“I had a gut feeling that it was wrong, and I just didn’t want to do it anymore,” Armijo said. “It wasn’t worth getting time on a specialized unit.”

Sanchez told the jury that it was difficult to defy Menon’s orders and went along with them because he felt Menon is a “smart guy.”

Menon “spoke real high on himself, like he went to Harvard, like this guy knows something I don’t know yet, and maybe he’s going to train us,” Sanchez said. But after detaining someone who was released because of a lack of probable cause, Sanchez said he felt Menon was going to get him, and fellow officers, “in trouble.”

After speaking about it with his wife, Sanchez said he put in a request to transfer to a different squad. “I didn’t want to be involved in any issues that could come out of this type of operations that he believed were right,” he said.

Sanchez recalled a conversation with a fellow officer in which they considered reporting Menon. “We were both upset,” Sanchez said. “We have values.”

While Sanchez said that he was concerned reporting his sergeant would harm his reputation and career prospects, he told the jury his concerns about Menon outweighed these.

If an incident like the ones he had experienced ever ended in someone being shot, killed or injured, Sanchez told the jury, he felt it could lead to “some type of civil unrest, and get some type of riots.”

He said he chose to report Menon. Several officers shared their concerns in a letter to the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, and these concerns were shared with Metro on May 15.

Menon faces multiple charges including oppression and battery. His attorney Austin Barnum previously told the Review-Journal that Menon is “absolutely not guilty.”

Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estellelilym on X and @estelleatkinsonreports on Instagram.