-What's working in law enforcement's fight to reduce deadly crashes, and how prepared is Las Vegas for a terrorist attack?

We asked Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill those questions and more this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪ -Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt and other supporters.

-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is asking the City and Clark County for more money to add a traffic squad and to expand Metro's Counter Terrorism Unit.

Reducing traffic fatalities and strengthening Metro's ability to prevent and respond to terrorism are priorities for the sheriff, who also wants his police department to be the most technologically advanced in the country.

He says private donations and grants are helping fund that goal, and it's prompting some ethical concerns.

Here now to discuss that and more is the sheriff himself, Kevin McMahill.

Welcome back to Nevada Week.

-Thanks for having me, Amber.

-Let's start with those deadly car crashes.

You have repeatedly said that you are more likely to die in Las Vegas in a car accident than you are by an act of violence.

And your proposed budget includes funding for, I believe, 11 officers for a traffic squad?

(Sheriff Kevin McMahill) Yeah, I think there was 11 as it worked out.

-Okay.

So then in a city of this size that continues to grow, how much of an impact can 11 officers really make?

-Yeah, well, listen.

We started-- And by the way, it still remains true today.

Even though we have almost a 30% reduction in traffic fatalities year to date, it's more dangerous for you to be driving on our roadways and potentially lose your life than in an act of violence, and still not acceptable.

Now, that's coupled with an additional 70% increase in traffic citations that my officers have written compared to the same time last year, with almost sole focus on those causal factors that are involved in these fatal accidents: DUIs, speeding, left turns, red lights, these kinds of things.

And so we're seeing a result by-- What I've had to do is I've had to take away from all of the area commands to create these LIFE teams to focus solely in on these traffic enforcement, and the addition of these officers there will allow me to continue to really have an impact and try to save lives on our roadway.

Part of what I intend to demonstrate through this is that it's not just enforcement, because we know that there has to be some penalty for these drivers.

Everything is a civil citation right now, with the exception of DUI, so we have to have additional conversation, both with the legislature as well as the city and county officials who make laws around this stuff.

-Oh, gosh.

But you're already having issues with getting prosecutions at this point.

So what makes you think that's going to work?

-Well, I'm an optimist.

I really believe that when people see the data that we take time to put together for them, that they understand the value of human life as well.

People don't really see and understand problems until they feel it themselves.

And so that's why I've been so public about this, and thank you for helping me spread the word about this.

But people are dying at far too great of a number in our community.

You know, I get afraid for--we were just talking about kids--like, my kids leaving the house.

I'm more afraid because of them driving and people you know, and we're getting to the point now where everybody knows somebody who's been impacted by a traffic fatality.

-Right.

You mentioned that you had to divert officers from different area commands in order to make that squad.

So what does that indicate about staffing levels at Metro right now?

-Well, listen.

I'm very fortunate to be one of the very few police departments in the entire country that has under 3%.

My vacancy rate, as I sit here right now, is only 1.2%.

So we are fully staffed.

I think it's a, it's a much larger conversation as we move forward in the coming years.

You know, we try to maintain a two officer per 1,000 permanent resident status.

We're there now, but that's zero credit for the 40-plus million visitors that come in and how do we police that?

And obviously, you know, that's a tremendous undertaking for us at a variety of different times throughout the year, and so-- And there's no shortage of new special events that are coming in here that are going to bring all kinds of new visitors to our town.

And so we're really looking at, we handle a lot of that through our special events overtime officers, but I'd like to increase the number of officers that we have as well.

-What about recruitment efforts?

Any issues there?

-No.

In fact, my folks that have been doing recruitment and hiring and retention have done a phenomenal job.

You know, I'm part of that major cities group that is the 58 largest cities in the country.

There's nobody that has a vacancy rate below ours.

It's an unbelievable thing.

I think people-- I think Metro really has a reputation of being a very progressive police department and getting it right.

And we try every day.

Look, we make mistakes, and I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit about some of the ones.

But at some point or another, we endeavor never to make the same mistake twice.

And that says a lot about the men and women of this organization.

-You said "mistakes."

Do you want to lead that conversation?

-Well, I think we started talking about protests a little bit here, right, so-- -Before we began.

-Yeah.

And I-- Look, the bottom line is, every single time there's a major protest that devolves into rioting that ends up in arrests, we end up having to learn something new from it, because a court case ensues, and then the courts rule a particular way, and we have to adjust our training and tactics and policy, period.

I look at those things sometimes where I wish we had a better, you know, sort of crystal ball to tell me what it is the courts are going to rule and how they're going to rule, but that's an example of what I'm talking about.

I'm not going to make the same mistake twice once a Court has told me this is acceptable or not acceptable.

And so those conversations are continuing every single day.

-For some more perspective, if we go back to I think June were those protests in which 90-something people were arrested.

And then a lot of those were thrown out, right?

-Yeah.

-And you were not okay with that.

You tried to get those charges reinstated.

How has that worked out?

-There's been a number of them that are still open that the City Attorney's Office has assured me that they're going to prosecute.

But it is true that the vast majority of those 90 arrests were, or citations, were thrown out.

And I have to be completely candid to the community, is that part of the reason for that is that the criminal justice system has become very accustomed to having a body-worn camera, a piece of footage attached to an arrest, attached to the individual officer.

And we were doing these mass arrests, and we weren't able to connect all of these things together at the time that we were doing it.

And I didn't foresee that, and so we've made adjustments again in policy so that that individual officer will be offline to complete the arrest for that individual, tag their own body-worn camera into it so that we don't give the opportunity for those cases to be dismissed, especially when, when I tell you that the only time, by the way, 350-plus protests last year at Metro, and there only was a couple of times that arrests even came out of those, right?

The vast majority of time, our community doesn't even hear about these protests.

But when you see a case where there's mass arrests, that means my men and women were standing out there taking rocks and frozen water bottles and batteries and those kinds of things.

That's when we declared an unlawful assembly, and we moved forward.

-I spoke with Indivisible Las Vegas, a local organizer of protests here, and they echoed what you just said.

They hold protests almost every weekend.

Metro is there, and there are no issues.

But this past No Kings protest on March 28 here in Las Vegas, they did not like what they saw from Metro.

So we're going to hear from them, followed by the ACLU of Nevada right now.

(Beth Osborne) We thought that it was a very intimidating show of force.

Zip ties, the helmets, the riot gear in a very peaceful setting is not very inviting, and there was no reason for it.

There was no reason for that many police officers to just be there standing around.

(Athar Haseebullah) Officers had the streets lined despite the fact that a permit was sought out, and traffic was blocked off.

Individuals were not allowed to step off the street, creating a jam of folks that were, were really kind of scared to move away.

Officers had zip ties that were displayed.

Federal buildings that were adjacent to that area had officers, Federal officers, with firearms that were shown.

As I've shared with law enforcement before, including folks in leadership before, the protest was not against Metro.

The protest was not against police officers.

If you make yourself a story out of a protest that is not involving you as a government institution, it's a problem.

-You want to respond to that?

-I agree with him; I don't believe the protest was about us.

But as he, and Athar and I have talked many a times, the No Kings protest had always been one of the-- That's where some of the 90 arrests had come from originally.

So you get thousands more people at those protests than what our typical protests are, and many of them previously have devolved into riotous behavior.

And so a show of force by the police is something that we have discussed early on.

I'm taking into consideration some of the complaints that he has given to us, as well as Indivisible.

And as you mentioned, Indivisible will tell you that we go out to their protests all the time, right?

But I also have to balance the responsibility as the Sheriff of Clark County and the leader of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department that I must keep this city safe and not let some of the things that have happened in lots of these other cities occur: property damage, people being hurt or beat, and as well, one of my responsibilities is to protect those people that are out there lawfully protesting, which we've seen in other cities where people get run over.

In fact, we've seen it on Las Vegas Boulevard where people have been run over before the bollards had been installed up there.

So it's a big responsibility.

I look at it from every angle, and I take that criticism back every time and I continue to adjust tactics as we move forward.

In fact, there's a couple policy changes, if you want to talk about, I could tell you very specifically about those.

-Sure.

-So one of which is the dispersal order.

So what happens is, when we've deemed a protest to become unlawful because of riotous behavior, we have always given a dispersal order.

And the courts have determined over the years what the dispersal order says, how many times you have to give it, you have to give it in English and Spanish.

And so what we found in the last one was that we gave those dispersal orders, but as the crowd, as the crowds move and they march and they go to new places, that there were instances where they didn't believe that the individuals that had been caught up by the crowd had ever heard a dispersal order.

It's chaotic.

It's loud.

So now we have new policy that says, you will, we will continually read dispersal orders.

We'll use amplification devices.

It'll be in English.

It'll be in Spanish.

So every time we move a block or two while these riot behaviors are occurring, we'll continue to give those dispersal orders.

And then the other one is we saw the individual with the one squad where they were walking by and said something to the sergeant and his officers and the individual got arrested.

And now what we do is that once we've moved beyond an area, we give them a final opportunity to depart the area, that the area has been claimed as unlawful and they need to leave.

So we'll give them one last chance to comply with the orders that we provided.

-Riot gear, though, still necessary in your opinion?

-Listen, I've been out there on the front lines with those men and women.

And when the rocks start flying and the bottles start flying and batteries, I have officers with broken arms and teeth and all these other, you have to have it on you.

The same as gas.

As soon as gas comes, there's no time to run back to your car to get all of this stuff.

And so that is one of the things I'm looking at, though, how many and where versus reinforcements and those kinds of things as we move forward.

-And then Athar with the ACLU of Nevada on that day had traveled up to Reno and Carson City to speak at those No Kings protests, and we have some video of the Reno protest.

Granted, he notes that the infrastructure there is different.

Now, they are marching down the street.

There's a plaza that they end up in.

The infrastructure is there, he says, for mass gatherings.

But he said the intimidation isn't a part of that.

How can that become how it looks in Las Vegas?

Or can it?

-Well, I think in looking-- And I've seen this video before.

So I think it-- The location that they choose to protest and oftentimes receive a permit for has a lot to do with the amount of police that you're going to see.

We're talking about Las Vegas Boulevard in front of the Federal Courthouse, where traffic is supposed to flow freely, or knock it down to one lane and put up barriers.

And so there's a lot of different aspects of what it is that goes into planning these things, but I would-- And we've had the conversations.

I've had that with a number of the individuals that we're talking about is we need to find a better place for them to exercise their First Amendment rights.

-Yeah.

Okay, let's move back to your budget requests.

And there is another request for counter terrorism concerns.

I believe you want to either hire or move seven analysts into the Counter Terrorism Center?

What is your plan there?

-Yeah.

So we don't have a 24/7 robust ability to look at not only local and national events, but global events and how they could come back and impact Las Vegas.

And so part of this, this Meridian Project is to make our Counter Terrorism Center our fusion center, the drone operation center, all the technology that's tied into one available to the commanders with real-time intelligence as it's happening in all of these places, and what does that look like here in Las Vegas if, in fact, if it decides to come.

We've known Las Vegas is a target for a very, very long time; and I'm not going to sit back anymore and have some periods of time uncovered, because the world is rapidly changing.

What we see happening in Iran right now, Ukraine, a number of things.

We have a lot of folks that come from those regions who have family in those regions, and it's my responsibility to make sure we protect it.

The other part of that, though, is that under that Project Meridian, I also intend to really build out a global infrastructure for real-time crime intelligence sharing so that we have developed relationships by having my officers go to various countries of interest to develop those relationships so that we're not waiting when an incident happens, that we've already established that communication, that relationship, so that we can be better prepared here in Las Vegas than we've ever been.

-Those seven analysts, are those going to be new hires, or are you moving people around?

-So we're moving on the analytical piece of it.

We're moving.

We also have a squad that goes out and does what we call SARs or Suspicious Activity Reports.

They are in the thousands now.

When I was a lieutenant back in the Counter Terrorism, we maybe had 100.

So the amount of people that can go look at reported suspicious activity has 10, 12x increased.

And so-- And you know this, Amber.

There's not one report that comes in that I can just say, Oh, that's not worth the time to look into, right?

And so now we have a responsibility to make sure that we have the amount of resources that I need to, to look at what people are taking time when they "see something, say something," that we actually have the resources to go out and do it without delay.

-As you mentioned, Las Vegas has long been thought of as a target for terrorism.

So why now?

Why make these investments now?

-I think it's just a natural evolution of where we're at, what we're seeing.

For a long time everybody thought it was going to be New York and LA and all of these other places.

And the way that DHS ranked cities, I think we were ranked at like 17 at one point.

There's not a more attractive place to hit than Las Vegas right now, and we have to grow into what our capabilities can be.

And that's the intent of adding this next squad in here, is to have people that are experts in regions.

Let me just give you a simple example.

A lot of people look at the conflict in Iran, and they don't understand that it's not the same thing as conflict in Iraq, as an example, or with ISIS.

Iran is predominantly Shia, right?

And many of the other countries that we're talking about are predominantly Sunni.

And so we have this conflict where people don't even really understand the outcomes that are potential for those particular groups.

I'll give you this example: There's about 5,000 people of Iranian descent that live here in Southern Nevada.

In fact, they just started an Iranian Chamber of Commerce.

So we have to be connected into those people.

Those people here in Las Vegas are predominantly pro Shah regime, prior to 1979.

But the second largest Iranian population outside of Iran is right next door in LA, and they have people from both sides.

And so how do we better understand what that looks like, and how could it impact Las Vegas through a four-hour car drive?

It's absolutely imperative for us to understand that better.

-So is the concern that this group of people would be a potential threat or that they are going to be targeted?

-Both.

-Both.

-Absolutely.

-What have you seen as a result of the war with Iran?

-Yeah.

I mean, a number of those protests that we had here in the valley were both pro Shah and pro regime, so you know you have people on both sides of these things.

And any, any particular attack, any particular event, could cause somebody to move from radicalization to action.

And we have to be in front of that, because we can't lose once.

And I'll say, let me answer this question for you, too, is that you said, "Why now?"

I think the other part of that is if you go back to One October for us, our police department changed radically.

When we lost 58 people, it changed me as a leader.

It changed almost everybody at Metro that was here, and I think that we feel a totally different type of responsibility now to making sure that those types of mass casualty events don't come to Las Vegas.

-And it's important you note that because there is the other side of the homegrown terrorism, which is what that was.

What's a bigger concern to you, the foreign related terrorism or the people here in the United States?

-Both.

We've arrested and prosecuted full-blown ISIS members here in our valley.

We just had an improvised explosive device go off in Laughlin a couple of days ago.

These things are happening.

Fortunately, my police department's pretty good; we're making the arrests and getting out and getting after it.

But the truth is every day, every week, which one you're more concerned about changes based on events that are happening around the world, which is the whole point of developing that real-time intelligence that has a global reach, rather than waiting on other federal agencies to tell me what it is that they want to tell us.

-You had that incident in Boulder City.

A guy from Albany, New York, drove all the way here to crash his car into a substation?

-Yeah.

And that was the second attack.

Actually, we had another one up in the Northeast a couple years prior, almost, almost exactly the same type of attack.

And then you had the Trump Tower bombing.

You had the bombing at Pieros.

There's all kinds of things that, when you look at it from a terrorism perspective, that Las Vegas has already been touched.

-So this Meridian Project, you said it's going to be privately funded.

Who is funding it?

-So we have the LVMPD Foundation and the Behind the Blue Foundation.

I get approached by people all the time asking me how it is that they can support the police department.

So we run it through those foundations so that it's open, it's public.

We also run it through our Fiscal Affairs Committee so that when we receive donations, you know, it's reported, and both the city and county representatives are there on each one of those.

And so what we try to do is we try to find technology in most of these cases that are going to support the police department in solving crimes.

That's the vast majority of what it is that we're spending money on from private citizens.

-When you say that it is open and public, I mean, is there a forum that members of the public can go to and say, I don't want Metro spending its foundation money on this drone that's going to fly over my backyard and see what I'm doing?

-Yeah.

So, well, first off, there's multiple opportunities for them to do that.

But they're welcome to-- The Fiscal Affairs is a public meeting, right?

It happens at police headquarters.

It's published.

It's documented what it is we'll be talking about, all of those kinds of things.

-And who votes on where the money goes?

-Two members-- Well, they don't vote.

They just approve that I'm going to be utilizing the money.

It's within my own organization.

Obviously, I'm an elected official.

I report to them through the Fiscal Affairs Bureau, but I'm free to utilize the funds as I deem fit within my organization.

And so it's-- But look.

These are also ways to solve crime.

And we can talk about this a little bit, but I know there's controversy around the Flock cameras and there's controversy around the drones, and we have published policies about how we use them.

You want to see the drone center?

Come check it out.

It's one of the most futuristic things you'll ever see in policing.

But we don't-- We utilize these things to save lives, to capture criminals.

These are not, these are not surveillance state.

These are not things that we're going out there to to spy on our community.

I'm not-- I don't want to spy on you.

I just want to catch people that are committing crimes.

-Right But you can say that, but how are people going to know that?

And you said that there are public policies, policies people can go and view what are you recording, what are you doing with that data.

And I think that's the same concern for the AI brain that you announced you're going to be creating within the Metro Police Department.

I mean, because I do want to know, if I'm out in public, what of my data are you recording and what are you doing with it.

-Yeah.

Well, the AI brain piece of this is going to be really cool.

And I know it scares people.

I get it.

Because if the data that's coming from AI is bad, that's no good for anybody.

-Right.

I mean-- -Which is why we're developing it internally, based off of our own systems to begin with.

So the first part of this is all internal administrative tasks.

That's the first part, so creating an Internal Affairs document that pulled the data from all these disparate systems and putting it into one document.

The detective will still have responsibility for the content of it, but it saves human time of having to transfer all of this stuff from all of these places.

-Administrative kind of work.

-All administrative to begin with.

That's where we're kicking the tires on the AI to see what it is.

It's already data we have, right, from our disparate systems.

-But down the road-- -I fully intend to utilize it in the investigative function, 100%.

Why?

Because I'll give you a simple example.

You get a guy that maybe commits rape and robbery, and he is successfully arrested, prosecuted, sent to prison.

He goes to prison for six or seven years.

I have no idea when the guy gets out, but let's say we now have another rape and robbery that fits the same methodology that this individual had previously.

Unless I have a detective in one of those places that was there when that person did that, there's never a way for me to connect those dots (A) that the guy got out of prison (B) that he did it this particular way in these kinds of places.

So AI has the ability to go in and connect dots that I don't really have right now.

But it's much like facial recognition technology in the sense that it doesn't develop probable cause.

It doesn't give me the authority to go out and arrest you because you popped up on the AI.

I still have to do police work and detective work to verify what all of this stuff is telling me.

But cell phone data dumps is another really good one.

When we have a very serious crime that occurs somewhere and I go to the court and I petition the court for a search warrant to get the cell phone data numbers that were connected.

So you, if I robbed you right here, my cell phone is connected to a particular tower.

I can get all those numbers there.

But let's say the second robbery occurs up by the Strip.

Your phone transfers to a different cell phone tower.

So now I can have the AI compare what telephone numbers were there and there and solve it.

And it's-- You have to imagine how many telephone numbers my analysts have to go through by eye right now, millions that come from each one.

And they all come in disparate data sets.

So this AI will be able to go in and look at all of these things and spit out something in a thousandth of the time that it would take a human being to do it.

-We're running out of time.

But when will this fully be implemented, and will you let the public know your policies and guidelines before implementing it?

-Yeah, I don't-- Of course we'll publish our policies like we do on everything else.

But as far as a timeline, I'm not ready to give that yet, because we're just in the very beginning phases of this, and I recognize that the public is, or anybody is hesitant on AI.

Everybody, I think, is still a little bit afraid of what AI is.

And so we're going to utilize it and utilize it in a way that is something that we're all very comfortable with.

-Sheriff Kevin McMahill, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

-Thanks for having me again.

-And thank you for watching.

For any of the resources discussed, go to vegaspbs.org.

And I'll see you next week on Nevada Week.

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