This was received via submission after originally being posted at the website of the Sunset Activist Collective.
Once again, Sheriff Gillespie and County Commissioner Tom Collins are trying to push the “More Cops” sales tax down the throats of the people of Las Vegas to fill the self-inflicted gaps in Metro’s already bloated budget and hire even more cops to harass and abuse the members of that very community.
Yet another sales tax is wrong from a practical standpoint in a time when the Las Vegas economy consistently ranks at or near the bottom in every financial category and most local residents are already just barely hanging on. By nature, sales taxes are regressive. Unlike wealthy people that have the capability of stashing most of their income in the bank, poor people generally have to spend most, if not all, of their money on the basic necessities of life. It’s not a coincidence that crime rates have increased as the economy has tanked. People that have little or no other options resort to whatever they have to do to survive. Taking even more from people that are already struggling just to keep their head above water is not the way to “take a bite out of crime.” It’s an unarguable fact that poverty leads to even more crime.
Beyond the basic economics it’s wrong on an ethical level to expect poor residents to fund their own abuse at the hands of the LVMPD. People in poor and/or minority neighborhoods are routinely stopped, searched, abused, and humiliated by the police. In fact, Metro employs several “saturation units,” whose stated function is to descend upon certain neighborhoods en masse seeking any excuse they can to stop, interrogate, and arrest residents of that community. And those many, many abuses don’t end with harassment and wrongful arrests, either. The victims of police beatings and outright murder are predominantly members of the 
poor/ minority classes.
Not surprisingly, it has also been explicitly stated that these “select’ neighborhoods don’t include the ones in Summerlin. Many of the proponents of the “More Cops” tax increase are, in fact, residents of Summerlin and other wealthy neighborhoods, who have expressed the desire to have a cop in their neighborhood because it makes them feel safe. I have very little doubt that the residents of poor neighborhoods would have no qualms about letting them have some of the cops terrorizing their neighborhoods. They rarely make them feel safe, especially within the Las Vegas area, since there is absolutely no hope that any sort of accountability will ever be imposed upon the perpetrators of injustices against them.
Metro isn’t short on cops, they’re short on priorities. Anyone who has witnessed the massive East German style check point erected on Fremont St. every First Friday or the continual harassment of water vendors and buskers on the Strip, both of whom are just trying to earn a living during tough economic times, would have to question the claims of personnel shortages within the LVMPD. When you can afford to employ undercover cops to ensure tourists don’t have the chance to buy water at a cheaper price than the casinos sell it, then maybe you have a few people to spare for other things. Perhaps those plain clothes cops using official Metro vehicles to escort Zappos employees to their parking garage so they don’t have to look at poor people along the way, could be better utilized, as well.
Gillespie and the rest of his mafia dons have expended their budget on raises for an already overpaid police force, shiny new headquarters buildings that they insisted on pushing forward with in the middle of the worst recession in history, and million dollar settlements to the victims of their abuses and murders. Now they want the poorest people within this community to bail them out so that they can hire more cops even while absolutely refusing to do anything to hold them responsible for the crimes they continue to commit against their own neighbors and families.
Just say NO to more thugs!
Kelly is a lifelong resident of Las Vegas, who’s been very active in local grassroots activism, as well as on a national level during his extensive travels. He’s also the founder/main contributor of Nevada Cop Block, served as editor/contributor at CopBlock.org and designed the Official Cop Block Press Passes.
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Move, that would fix them. Vote with your feet.
I’ve moved from state to state to state over the last decade. At some point a man has to put his foot down and say NO MORE.
Great commentary, Kelly.
The citizens of Summerlin should NOT be supporting a tax increase to merely feather the nests and bank accounts of Metro’s paid killers. May I remind Summerlin residents that my son, Erik, lived in Summerlin, and was a very successful businessman, yet he was shot down in cold blood by low-IQ, knuckle-dragging Metro thugs–for daring to have a BlackBerry smartphone in his right hand. Then Metro’s crack “detectives” corrupted the crime scene, manufactured evidence, stole firearms from Erik’s condo, helped destroy the Costco video evidence of Erik’s murder-by-Mosher, then repeatedly lied under oath.
Metro’s outlaw killer-cops are equal-opportunity murderers, regardless of neighborhood demographics. Don’t waste your hard-earned money to buy more worthless Thirteener cops for Gillespie, Neville and the Tower!
I can’t believe Metro would have the balls to ask us to pay money to put more of the biggest criminals i have ever dealt with on the streets .North LasVegas is no better.These gangbangers get away with murder because they wear a badge.That doesn’t float with .They are way out of hand and something needs to be done about it.
Yesterday, December 7th, I witnessed a police officer going north on Swenson pull over his vehicle just before the Flamingo intersection, wave over an older homeless man and put him in cuffs in front of the car. I do not know what the man’s crime was, if anything, but what happened next is why I am posting this.
As the man yelled out in pain another cop car came with sirens flying east on Flamingo, pulled right in front of the traffic going north on Swenson and two officers came out to assist.
Then another cop car came from the north of Swenson and two more officers “assisted”. I watched for a few minutes more and the ANOTHER cop car came from the north and TWO MORE officers came out.
At this point I left. There were seven officers assisting the one officer who already had his suspect in cuffs and they were blocking nearly all the traffic going north on Swenson and Flamingo.
Why do they need more cops again?
When an older basically conservative person reads something like this and agrees with it, then you know society and these over militarized police departments have a real problem. Something like 70% of SWAT actions are for relatively minor incidents. Older cops don’t like or agree with these ” thirteeners ” or their gestapo mentality, but they are not going to break the blue code of silence. It scares me and I’m white middle class. Watch out America where we are headed.