-He leads one of the most technologically advanced police departments in the country and oversees one of the largest mental health facilities in the state.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill joins us this week on Nevada Week.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Now in his third year as Sheriff, he made national headlines when he announced that his department would soon have the largest fleet of Tesla police trucks in the country.

This just two months after he publicly acknowledged Tesla CEO Elon Musk for Musk's help in the investigation of a cybertruck explosion outside the Trump Hotel on New Year's Day.

He used that same spotlight to highlight the importance of mental health resources for veterans, saying that's why he created the Wellness Bureau for Metro officers.

Joining us now to talk about that and more is Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill.

Sheriff, thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Thanks for having me, Amber.

I appreciate it.

Glad to be back.

-So the cybertruck explosion, this was a highly decorated combat veteran who organized this.

He died by suicide in that truck before it exploded.

The FBI said that they think he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's been about two months.

Is there anything new to this investigation?

Is it still ongoing?

(Sheriff Kevin McMahill) So partially what happened in that investigation was there was another document that we had found in some of his devices, that there was some classified material that the Department of Defense asked us to not release.

And so our investigation is basically concluded, and any further updates on that investigation will have to come from DOD as they work through that classified information.

-Okay.

He was 37 years old.

And according to the latest data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, suicide is the second leading cause of death for veterans under 45 years old.

As for law enforcement, there is research that shows an officer is more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty.

You mentioned this was partly why you started the Wellness Bureau.

It opened in November.

How well is it being utilized?

-Well, I got to tell you, it's, it's being utilized beyond what I even dreamed it would be utilized.

Just this last month, we had 425 of our members actually take part in the mental health counseling or some version of what it is that's happening in that, that Wellness Bureau.

We've expanded that to our family members, as well as even retirees from Metro, because for many years, we didn't have anything for those that have now retired and struggled with the departure from the job, which is almost like losing a family member, because you love it so much and you give so much to it while you're here.

But the bottom line is that what my men and women see and do, hear, and feel and smell out there, day in and day out, fatal accidents and murders and rapes and robberies and child abuse, these things live in our heads and in our hearts.

My men and women really give a darn about what it is that they do, and so I decided I was going to do something and I was going to make sure we took care of them in ways we've never taken care of them before.

I think the proof's in the pudding at how much they're using it.

But the ultimate goal here is a healthy, happy workforce.

I'm proud to tell you that last year we had a year that we did not have one of our members commit suicide.

That's the first time since, I believe, 2012.

It's also about saving our lives.

These men and women, go through a lot.

They put it all online for this community, and I'm going to do everything I can while I'm sheriff to make sure we take care of them.

-How well aware do you think the public is of what officers may face mentally?

-You know, that's a really good question, because I think part of what happens is society becomes sort of numb to what it is.

You know, it's still-- the news talks about if it bleeds, it leads.

Every story that's out there every single day, nobody ever pauses long enough to think about what it looked like for that police officer, that detective, or that crime scene investigator to have to go out there and deal with that or to deal with the loved ones, or, in the case of fatal accidents, I'm sure we're going to talk about red lights at some point here, as well as it's traumatic to go to the scene of a fatality traffic accident and see the damage that these vehicles have done to human bodies and then expect cops and all of those people to just be normal after they go out there and deal with it.

We have to teach them appropriate outlets and we have to teach them coping mechanisms and we have to teach them it's okay to not be okay when it gets to a certain point, and that's exactly what Wellness is doing.

-So you have clinicians on site, counselors on site.

Are you utilizing the Wellness Bureau?

-I sure do, yeah.

In fact, there's a, there's a machine that we make available for our officers called the Alpha-Stim machine.

And it's, it was actually developed for people like our Tesla truck bomber, who was deployed overseas in combat situations many times and they come back and they have PTSD, anxiety, trauma, sleepless nights.

I used the Alpha-Stim machine last night before I went to bed.

It reduces that anxiety.

It allows you to clear your mind and allows you to go to sleep.

But I also use talk therapy.

I speak to my counselor, and part of that is to lead from the front and, you know, do anything that you ask your people to do.

And so-- but it's also very beneficial to me.

You know my wife retired from Metro, I think you might know, as a deputy chief, and we had talked about wellness for a long time and seen how it impacted our marriage, impacted our kids, impacted-- my kids grew up with Mom and Dad not being there sometimes when they woke up because we responded to the One October or a, you know, other major incident or even just an officer-involved shooting investigation.

And so it's not even normal sometimes for our children to see and experience things that others don't.

And so that's really important to make sure we take care of one another as we move forward, and that's why we developed it.

-We had an officer on Nevada Week a couple years back who explained that there is hesitation among officers to talk about their mental health struggles out of fear that they may be deemed unfit to do their job, maybe even have their guns taken away.

How are you overcoming that stigma, that concern?

Is it still present?

-Look, there's always going to be that stigma in law enforcement, because it did exist for a long time.

If you had a mental health crisis in law enforcement when I first hired on in 1990, you would have been run out of the police department, quite frankly.

Even though we had employee assistance programs and those kind of things in place, those were typically designed to deal with the aftermath of an officer involved shooting.

Today, we recognize that all the stressors that every human being has, to include yourself, is also prevalent in law enforcement and oftentimes exacerbated by the type of work that it is that they do.

And so we've proven to our officers that it's not going to impact their employment status, it's not going to impact their promotions and transfer status, that we are going to invest in them and pour into them and try to get them back to a healthy place so that they can continue on in their career and be successful all the way to the end.

-I want to talk about mental health in a broader sense now.

There is a study by the American Psychological Association that found that nearly 20% of all calls to law enforcement involve someone with a mental health crisis.

Does that number sound about right for Metro?

-20%?

I'd say that's severely underestimated.

You know, if you just look at-- if you look at our Clark County Detention Center, about 70% of the people that are in the Clark County Detention Center today are on some type of psychotropic medicine to deal with mental health or substance abuse issues.

If you just translate that back out into calls for service, I would have to tell you it's probably much higher, but we have a real mental health crisis in America.

We have a real mental health crisis in our cities and our counties, and, you know, that's part of the reason we're working with the private sector, the State, and other people to come up with this Campus of Hope for homelessness, mental health, and addiction, because they all three sort of cross over.

If you have one, you're very often likely to have all three, right?

And so trying to find ways that we can reduce the responsibility of police to have the only ability to deal with these folks, because putting them in jail doesn't resolve mental health or addiction or even homelessness.

And so we are trying and doing everything from a best practice perspective, coresponse with mental health providers in our police cars to go out there and have those interventions.

Our hot teams and our homeless teams work together with a lot of different providers to provide services to people, but people are service resistant because they're mentally ill or they're addicted or they don't want to go into a treatment center.

So we got to keep trying, and we will keep trying.

And I think we see some great success with it, but it is a complex problem.

-So when you refer to the Clark County Detention Center as the largest mental health facility in the state, I'm assuming, and correct me if I'm wrong, that these officers, when they are meeting these people with mental health crises, they are arresting some of them and taking them back to CCDC?

-Yeah.

I mean, there's oftentimes no alternative there, because somebody has committed a crime.

In fact, we've heard from a number of them that the only care that they get when they're in crisis is to be taken to jail.

So they'll go out and commit a crime, knowing full well that they're going to go back into jail.

And what happens in the jail is they get stabilized, right?

There's no access to street-level narcotics in there.

There's access to health care and medical care in the jail, and it's a relatively safe environment for them.

They're not sleeping out on the streets.

They're not doing the drugs.

And so there are lots of people that decide to commit a crime to go back to the jail, because that's actually where they feel safe.

-Wow.

Forensic beds, will you explain what they-- what role they play in this scenario and do you have enough of them?

-Well, the answer to the second question is there's absolutely not enough forensic beds.

And it's a little bit of a complex issue, so I'm going to try very quickly to make this understandable.

But what happens is, is when an individual is arrested and they're going to stand trial, oftentimes they've been deemed incompetent, so we have to get them to a place through medication, through treatment, through counseling where they've been deemed competent.

There's a very small number of beds in the entire state that does this.

In fact, most of the detention are-- the folks in detention that we send from Clark County, we send to a place called Lake's Crossing up in Northern Nevada, where they then get sort of stabilized, deemed competent, and then they're brought back to Las Vegas to stand trial.

Well, what happens almost every time is that they're now competent, they're back here getting ready to stand trial, and the case gets continued, continued, continued.

And now they stop taking the medication that we're providing to them--there's lots of different things--and they end up getting to a place where they're not deemed competent again.

Now that we have very few beds, we have to wait till a bed reopens to send that person back up again to be declared competent, to then come back down, and the cycle continues.

So we are trying lots of different things, just like the MAT program, or a Medication Assisted Treatment program, that we've recently instituted in the jail to get people off of the opioid highs that they-- that we've seen from severe addiction cases in our community.

-So the state legislature is supposed to determine how to fund a forensic hospital here in Southern Nevada this session.

How helpful would that be to you?

-Unbelievably helpful.

-I want to go back to those Tesla police trucks that I mentioned.

So you announced this at the State of the Department that it was an anonymous donor who gave these to the department, but then later Metro revealed who those donors were.

Why?

-Yeah, I know there's a big conspiracy around that that I didn't release who the donor was, and I know a lot of people thought it was the owner of Tesla, Mr. Musk, but that's not true.

The reason I didn't announce it, I was literally standing up there, and I realized I had not gotten permission from Mr. Horowitz.

Ben and Felicia Horowitz were the donors of the Tesla trucks, and I had not gotten his permission to release their name that they were the actual donor.

I'm a man of my word, and I've always given my word.

And early on, when we started our conversations around his donation of technology to us, he had wanted to remain anonymous.

And so as soon as I had said that, we went back and then we corrected it after I received his permission to announce that Ben and Felicia and their foundation were the ones that ordered those trucks for us.

I do want to say to you, though, that I ordered those trucks long before the Tesla truck explosion.

And not only is there a Tesla, the largest fleet of 10 Tesla trucks that will be in, in play for policing, but we're also getting the first ever Tesla SWAT truck that's being constructed for us, which will augment the armored vehicles that SWAT uses in hostage barricade-type situations.

And it's exciting.

-You mentioned it as a tremendous recruiting tool, but I also wonder, there are plenty of people out there who do not like Elon Musk.

Does that detract from the recruiting?

-That's-- you know, I've seen-- look, I'm like anybody else, I pay attention to the news.

I see the reporting that's out there.

You know, if you would have went back six months and we were talking about getting all electric vehicles, there was a lot of pressure from people to say, Sheriff, you need to completely convert your fleet to electric vehicles.

I can't afford these trucks.

I can't afford all electric vehicles all across the board.

This was an opportunity to increase our technological advancement.

As you've heard, I want to be the most technologically advanced police department in the country.

There's kind of a wow factor with it.

It's a cool factor.

I want to attract more people to our community.

I want more people to want to become cops.

All of those things matter to me when it comes to the deployment of these things.

Just think about when they're stopped at a Tesla charger, or wherever it is that they're charging these vehicles, and there's 20 minutes that they get an opportunity to interact with people from not only our community, but really throughout the world that are here visiting us.

And people see the police in a different light and in ways that we have an opportunity to interact with them.

I acknowledge that the narrative has changed, but I don't buy into the narrative when it's left or right.

I'm just trying to do the right thing and keep this community safe.

And by the way, as that explosion absolutely demonstrated, those trucks are very safe for individuals that will be driving them as well.

-And that is another huge argument in recruiting is you are deploying equipment that will ultimately keep officers out of the line of danger until they actually have to be there to arrest someone.

Can you paint a picture of how that works, especially with the drones, for example.

-What I want to be very clear about is my deployment of technology is deployed when a crime occurs.

It's no different than you call 911 and a cop starts to come.

Now what you're getting is drone as a first responder deployed just like a K-9 unit.

They'll pull up but stop short of the scene, launch a drone, and they'll give realtime intelligence from overhead to responding cops to say, The suspect is here, he looks like this, he's holding a gun, he's facing this direction, all different kinds of information that we don't have right now.

We rely on people to call and tell us that, and most of the time what they tell us is only partially correct.

And certainly by the time they saw it, got away to call us and tell us what happened, is not realtime intelligence.

This ability to actually provide realtime intelligence to police officers on the ground as they respond is going to stop my cops from getting hurt.

It gives us time to pause or hurry up.

It gives us time to add additional resources to gather maybe if it's SWAT that we need and the guy's not actively killing anybody or there's a victim down and we need to get in there because they're bleeding out.

Those, those things can be told to us by the detective who's piloting that drone and says, You've got to get here, or, You got time, you have an opportunity to slow down, decrease the momentum, and save lives.

-I want to go back to the donors of the Tesla trucks, Ben and Felicia Horowitz.

So Ben is a venture capitalist.

He invests in technology, and he has said, Yes, I've donated millions of dollars to Metro, and they have used some of that money to buy equipment from companies that are in my own portfolio.

Do you see an issue with that?

-No.

-Why not?

-Well, first off, because of the way that it came about.

First off, I don't just buy technology that's in Ben's portfolio.

Tesla trucks are a perfect example of that, right?

Secondly, we helped Skydio, who's going to be the drones that are going to be tied to gunshot detection systems and license plate reader systems that are going to launch from our area commands and go overhead when a gunshot-- so if I pulled this gun out right now, I shot it off, those gun-- they're going to send a location to that drone, that drone is going to launch from the area command, go overhead, and we're going to be able to do what I just said to you, realtime intelligence.

But we worked with Skydio many, many years before Ben ever came along by exposing them to what the needs of law enforcement are so they can develop their technology to actually get to a place that serves law enforcement in its mission to save lives.

I have other companies that we utilize the drones for, BRINC as an example.

BRINC, we helped them develop their drone as well.

So they have now glass breaking ability with their tiny drones that I can take it right up to a car where a subject's barricaded inside the car and break the glass on the car, which helps communication, which helps SWAT operations.

I have them where we can fly into the attics of a house on a barricaded subject.

Because they listen to the needs of law enforcement and change their technology to fit the needs so that we are far more effective than we had been previously.

This is certainly at least an interesting conversation surrounding police funding, especially at a time when you acknowledged in your State of the Department that economic headwinds are hitting us square in the nose.

-Yeah.

-But you reiterated, no layoffs.

Are you concerned about funds being cut, perhaps from the federal grants that you receive should Elon Musk come after you?

-Yeah, listen, I mean we-- I will tell you this about Metro itself, and this goes way back to when even Bill Young was the sheriff and then Doug Gillespie and Joe Lombardo.

We've always made sure that we don't utilize federal funds in perpetuity for positions.

So in other words, when we have a position that we want to hire, say as a homeland security analyst for our fusion center, we may get that funding initially for that person or that position as a demonstrated need, say for cyber security as one of the most recent positions that we did.

But we always operate where we will absorb that position within the next year or two into our general budget.

We do receive a significant number of dollars for Homeland Security grant funding, the operation of our fusion center, to the tune of, in my jurisdiction, just about $30 million.

-A year?

-Yes, a year.

Very wise use of that, those dollars.

I'm not too concerned that any of those are going to go away because they're tied to results that we have here.

So, but look, I mean, in today's world, nothing's off the, off the plate, and so if they do come, we're prepared to figure out how we are going to move forward with the complete focus in on making sure that we keep crime down.

We've been driving crime down.

We've been very successful against that, and that is what I believe most people in the community want to grade me on as their sheriff, and I'm going to continue to be laser focused on that.

-And I want to make sure we get in your push for red light cameras this legislative session.

There has been a ban on those cameras in place in Nevada since 1999, that legislative session.

We had a Nevada Democracy Project listening session.

Recently, State Senator Melanie Scheible was asked about that, and she gave this explanation as to why they have not come into existence just yet.

(Melanie Scheible) We've had so many conversations about traffic cameras, including red light cameras, and I'm confident in saying right now that the data is mixed on whether or not they are effective.

And we've also been talking so much today about government spending.

I think this is, you know, an excellent, excellent example of the kind of debate that we have in the legislature, because, generally, those traffic cameras are run by private corporations, and it is a money making operation for them.

So we, as a government, today, if, you know, somebody writes you a ticket for running a red light and you pay a $250 fine, that full $250 goes to the government.

It might be split between the city and the county and the highway fund, but it all goes to the government.

When you put a red light camera in there, you start paying $10 of every $250 fine to the red light camera company.

And so is that how we want to spend our money?

As Nevadans, do we want to pay a third-party corporation to get rich off of Nevadans who are running red lights?

-Okay.

Invasion of privacy, the disproportionate impact on people of color, adding people to an already overburdened legal system, there are so many reasons to argue against red light cameras, but when she says that the data is mixed on how effective they are, how would you respond?

-I think she's right.

Listen, I have a lot of respect for the Senator and the Assemblywomen up there.

I don't think what she says is entirely wrong, but what she said was it's mixed.

And what I'll say to you about that is the beauty of what I'm proposing, and I wish people would really just hear what I'm saying.

I'm not asking for red light cameras all over our community.

I'm not asking for speed cameras all over.

I want to do a pilot program, see what works here in Nevada.

I want to pick the intersections, the top 20 intersections that we have red light violations that are causing fatality accidents.

I want to-- we have Boulder Highway, as an example.

Be honest, have you ever followed the speed limit along Boulder Highway when you drove there?

The answer is no, because I don't even do it.

But if you knew as you're driving down Boulder Highway there's a couple speed cameras that are going to get you if you continue to drive 65, 75, 85 miles an hour down Boulder Highway, which is not really a highway, you might say, you know, I'll slow down.

The intent behind this for me is that, as she mentioned, they can craft legislation however they want.

I don't want some weird company that comes in here and puts these things in and benefits off the backs of Southern Nevada.

What I want to do is go in and make the machines pay for themselves, and then let's take that money, that excess money that comes from the capturing of those fees, and put it back into engineering and education.

Let me give you an example.

We don't have any mandate if you're a brand new driver to go in and get some kind of driver's training course, driver's education course.

What if we could take that excess funds and make every brand new driver go learn actually how to drive from a professional?

What if, and I use this example a lot, if you drive down in front of University of Nevada Las Vegas today, you drive down the street and there's an offset intersection for pedestrian crossing.

If you press the light--you're a student at UNLV and you're crossing the street there--you press the light, there's these big yellow flashing lights, well-marked crosswalk, you walk halfway across the street.

You get to the center, you press another button.

The opposite directions, lights flash, cars stop, you walk across safely.

We haven't had a fatality accident over there because of that engineering fix in years.

We have the requirement and the necessity all over this town to go and do those kind of things.

So they have the authority and the ability to pass the law however they want.

But to me, if we would go-- and, you know, I saw Assemblywoman Gallant on there.

Her and I had lots of conversation around this.

She had originally brought up a conversation around maybe providing Uber rides from dispensaries with some of that money.

At the end of the day, I believe it should be put back into educating our drivers, because here's the deal, Amber.

Here's what I really want: Today, you have more of a likelihood, honestly, you and your family members, of dying from a fatality car wreck in our town than being murdered.

And what I want people to do, I really, truly want them to wake up and say, when you go out there today to leave this building to start your car, to say, you know what, I need to slow down.

I need to not run red lights.

I need to be cognizant of the fact that bad behavior and bad driving from people in this community are killing people at a far greater rate than they ever have.

It's all of our responsibility to change our behavior, and I'm not going to apologize for that position.

-Sheriff Kevin McMahill, let's have you back on after this legislative session, please.

-I hope we have a lot to talk about.

-All right.

Thank you for joining Nevada Week.

-Thank you.

-And thank you for watching.

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

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