Officers must embrace ‘deadly force’ reforms

The Community Oriented Policing Services division of the U.S. Department of Justice - headed by the former police chief of Pasadena, Calif. - Thursday released the results of its seven-month investigation into officer-involved shootings by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, along with 75 findings and recommendations designed to de-escalate situations which have led to Metro killing too many unarmed people in recent years.

The review was sparked by the publication, late last year, of a year-long Review-Journal investigation into police shootings in Southern Nevada, including the shooting of small-time drug dealer Trevon Cole by a Metro officer with a military-style .223 rifle as Cole, unarmed, knelt on his own bathroom floor. That officer had misidentified Cole on the sworn affidavit used to acquire his search warrant, though neither that error nor the subsequent killing triggered any prosecution.

In fact, the review process used for police killings in Southern Nevada is "police friendly," the report found, helping to explain why police are exonerated 99 percent of the time.

The federal study also included an analysis of events that led to unarmed Iraq War veteran Stanley Gibson being shot and killed by a Metro officer with a military-style .223 rifle as an apparently lost and disoriented Gibson, unarmed, sat in his car in an apartment complex parking lot, surrounded by other officers, mere days after the Review-Journal's series was published. A grand jury is reviewing that death.

Both Cole and Gibson were black, as was Orlando Barlow, whose 2003 shooting by a Metro police officer armed with a .223 rifle was followed by the infamous incident in which members of that shooter's unit in the Southwest Area Command took to wearing "BDRT" T-shirts. A union representative said the letters stood for "Big Dogs Run Together," but other officers contended they commemorated the Barlow shooting and stood for "Baby's Daddy Removal Team."

Bernard Melekian, head of the Justice Department's COPS division, told the Review-Journal's editorial board Wednesday "It is never appropriate for officers of any kind to wear T-shirts identifying them as a 'Baby's Daddy Removal Team.'"

He also said the widespread use of such military-style weaponry as the .223-caliber rifle "certainly is relevant" to the problems Metro has been having.

The study's major findings:

- Las Vegas police shootings of unarmed people are most likely to occur during officer-initiated stops. The agency should require additional training for officers on the legal parameters of such stops.

- The department's de-escalation training, currently optional, should be required annually.

- "Tactical errors and fatalities are more prevalent when multiple officers are on the scene." The department should have more training in multiple-officer situations.

Breakdowns in radio communications during use-of-force incidents were also highlighted. The department recently announced it will scrap its new radio system.

The Justice Department review is not legally binding. Instead, the team will return in six months to see how police have adopted their recommendations. The study leaves open the possibility that the Civil Rights Division could sue the agency, seeking a binding consent decree - a more expensive and time-consuming process.

In fact, that's the course still favored by some critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and the Las Vegas chapter of the NAACP, which note nothing in the report is mandatory, and the DOJ stopped short of recommending that officers be equipped with body cameras.

The Justice Department officials, in town for the release of their report Thursday, stressed that they have found the Metro brass cooperative. That's good news. It's to be hoped the rank and file at Metro will share their leaders' openness to outside recommendations that - as Mr. Melekian stressed last week - "do nothing that in any way threatens officer safety."

But let's not pretend this report is all flowers and soft music. Some instructors who were to teach Metro's new use-of-force policy this year actually undercut the changes, the report found. "Most troubling is the fact that, on several occasions, LVMPD instructors expressed outright disapproval of some components of the new policy to trainees during class."

Skeptics argue the recommendations amount to "offering milk and cookies" to street thugs. Yes, officers are trained to gain control of a situation quickly. But James K. "Chips" Stewart, the former Oakland, Calif., police chief who headed the study, found problems with the culture at Metro, as well as an overall lack of accountability.

A department where the sheriff knows one of his officers who has shot and killed two residents wears a tattoo of two shell casings under a skull and crossbones, but says there's nothing he can do about that, would indeed seem to have a culture in need of reform.

Sheriff Gillespie vows to follow the recommendations and insists costs won't be allowed to get in the way. Good. Because continuing to escalate situations until they unnecessarily involve the use of deadly force won't rebuild public confidence. And an environment in which police lack the confidence of the public won't benefit officer safety in the long run.