No police shooting has resulted in criminal charges in Las Vegas, ever.
Handcuffed guy running away and shot in the back? Justified. An unarmed man clad only in a pair of shorts, handcuffed and on the ground, surrounded by police with weapons aimed at him? Justified. Unarmed man with a basketball? Justified.
As long as they kill and don’t merely wound, Las Vegas police know that they will never be prosecuted. Visitors to Las Vegas: be warned.
This why I have a hard time trusting cops. Catch the wrong guy on the wrong day and he can beat the living shit out of you with no consequences. The local drug task force harassed my wife and her boss recently over seizing an account. Because the cops fucked up the paperwork, the suspect was able to get a bunch of his money out over a weekend and my wife gets threatened with getting arrested. Her branch had to pay out the money the cops claimed was missing and take it as a loss.
It’s let’s go throw stuff in the quarry’d up.
Tell you what, Quartz: come to Vegas and set up a sniper position in a hotel on the Strip. When you see a cop car come to deal with a drunk or a speeding car or something, go ahead and kill the civilian and then claim that you were afraid that there was some danger to the cop, so you killed the guy he was dealing with. See if DA lets you walk. This being Vegas and all, what do you think the odds would be that you’d not be prosecuted at all?
The Stanley Gibson case was even more egregious than that. He was literally, actually, trapped in his vehicle, penned in by cops cars on all sides. Watch the video.
A Grand Jury declined to pass down any indictments. If you feel like your local law enforcement are not held accountable, it doesn’t seem it’s because of a rigged system with prosecutors protecting them, it’s because of your fellow citizens who were seated on the GJ.
Here in Nevada, Grand Juries follow the recommendation of the prosecutor like 99.98% of the time. The Gibson GJ was no different; it followed the recommendation of the prosecutor, DA Steve Wolfson who was using it for cover so that he doesn’t have to take responsibility for not indicting Officer Arevalo.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal did a huge story on Las Vegas police shootings starting in December of 2011. It’s available on amazon.com as a Kindle book
( Amazon.com ); the LVRJ seems to have taken it down from their website, unfortunately. In nearly 400 officer-involved shootings, not once has an officer been found to have acted improperly.
To be clear, it’s not just Las Vegas police. Henderson, NV has had similar incidents as have other municipalities. No officer has ever, according to the law, shot and killed anyone improperly. And this valley has the highest use of force incidence of any place in the entire country.
These things didn’t happen when Gil Grissom was on the job. But just look what happened when Cowboy Curtis and Sam the Bartender take over? I mean, they had no experience in cop work and they are bosses of the most famous crime scene investigating departments in the country?
I’m just saying that those cops wouldn’t have walked if Grissom was still on the job.