Does Las Vegas PD shoot more people than other PD?

[puma guy]

Given the recent posts re: the Costco Erik Scott shooting I started wondering if LV Metro PD is comparable to other similarly sized cities? Seems like they have a lot of shootings.

[seamusTX]

Las Vegas is not too much out of line.

The rate of police shooting is so low, it is subject to extreme fluctuations due to only a few incidents. It's like commercial airplane crashes. You can have zero or five in a year. Statistically the variation looks huge.

The rates vary between 1 and 5 per hundred thousand population, with many cities or counties reporting zero.

Washington D.C. seems to be the worst at more than 5 per 100,000.

You also have to keep in mind that Las Vegas has a lot of out-of-control drunks and racial tension.

- Jim

[puma guy]

Las Vegas is not too much out of line.

The rate of police shooting is so low, it is subject to extreme fluctuations due to only a few incidents. It's like commercial airplane crashes. You can have zero or five in a year. Statistically the variation looks huge.

The rates vary between 1 and 5 per hundred thousand population, with many cities or counties reporting zero.

Washington D.C. seems to be the worst at more than 5 per 100,000.

You also have to keep in mind that Las Vegas has a lot of out-of-control drunks and racial tension.

- Jim

Do you have a source for statistics? Every seach I did said deadly police shootings are not required to be reported by PD per the FBI.

[seamusTX]

I do not have an authoritative source.

If you search the Google for terms like "police shooting per capita" and "police shooting statistics," you will find various articles about it.

The FBI publishes the number of justifiable homicides in the Uniform Crime Report. However, there are only a few hundred justifiable homicides per year in the U.S. The number of shootings is far higher. I would guess from my perusal of the news that there are several a day, thousands per year. More people survive shootings every year due to better emergency response.

- Jim

[puma guy]

I do not have an authoritative source.

If you search the Google for terms like "police shooting per capita" and "police shooting statistics," you will find various articles about it.

The FBI publishes the number of justifiable homicides in the Uniform Crime Report. However, there are only a few hundred justifiable homicides per year in the U.S. The number of shootings is far higher. I would guess from my perusal of the news that there are several a day, thousands per year. More people survive shootings every year due to better emergency response.

- Jim

Thanks. I'll search with those sorts of terms. I didn't elaborate but the UCR seems to be unreliable because fatal shooting are not required to be reported justified or not. At least that's my understanding.

[seamusTX]

In one sense, the FBI cannot force local authorities to provide data. However, the local authorities do provide it to some extent, and the statistics are published:

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offense ... le_14.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/offense ... le_15.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Second however, justifiable homicides are not equivalent to police shootings. Many shooting victims survive, and not all police shootings are justified.

It's also interesting to note that a fraction of justifiable homicides are accomplished by weapons other than firearms, or possibly by strong-arm force.

- Jim

[The Annoyed Man]

Someone please correct me if I'm not remembering correctly, but I recall from one article I read somewhere that one of the LV officers involved in that Costco shooting had already previously shot and killed at least a couple of other people in just 5 years on the force and that this is his third fatal shooting in that time. Lots of officers serve 20 years without ever firing a shot in anger. So the officer in question is a statistical anomaly. I'm not saying this one officer's statistics are indicative of all LV officers, but I am saying that the LVPD are certainly guilty of retaining the services of someone who probably isn't psychiatrically suited for police work.... ....and instead of looking deeper into his fitness for duty, they are jumping through hoops to protect him from further scrutiny.

Something stinks about that.

[puma guy]

Someone please correct me if I'm not remembering correctly, but I recall from one article I read somewhere that one of the LV officers involved in that Costco shooting had already previously shot and killed at least a couple of other people in just 5 years on the force and that this is his third fatal shooting in that time. Lots of officers serve 20 years without ever firing a shot in anger. So the officer in question is a statistical anomaly. I'm not saying this one officer's statistics are indicative of all LV officers, but I am saying that the LVPD are certainly guilty of retaining the services of someone who probably isn't psychiatrically suited for police work.... ....and instead of looking deeper into his fitness for duty, they are jumping through hoops to protect him from further scrutiny.

Something stinks about that.

I believe it is three shootings but maybe one was not fatal??? He may have been on the force a little longer --- maybe seven years but even at 20 years 3 shootings is an anomaly of astronomical proportions. The officer (Yant) that shot Trevon Cole also has two priors I think. My grandfather was a NYPD partolman and later a detective in the early twentys through the forty's and never fired his weapon in service . That's typical. There will always be statistical anomalies but I saw a blog somewhere that alluded to the fact that LAS Vegas pays a lot of $$ to victims for shootings. The guy was supportive of the PD activities in that aspect BTW.

[philip964]

Las Vegas in relatively record time has had:

an unarmed African-American man on knees with his hands on his head (or being threatening with chapstick) was shot once and killed by a police office serving a questionable warrant;

a legally armed (or maybe not per the letter of the law) Euro-American man who was disarming (or was only moving his hand or was pointing his uncocked, no round in the chamber, holstered gun) at a police officer was shot seven times (five times in the back on the ground) by three police officers, while responding 911 call to a man with a gun acting eraticaly;

and a knife holding mentally ill Euro-American 15 year old boy who was threatening his mom at home was shot and killed by police arriving after being called by the mom to help her with her son.

In Houston during the same time frame I didn't find any shootings let alone deaths at the hands of police officers.

In early 2010 an off duty Houston police officer in Arlington, Texas shot six times and killed a African-American 18 year old in what was described as a "gang fight", the victim was reported to be brandishing a gun. This is really a Dallas shooting not a Houston shooting.

However in 2009 the police in Houston did kill 15 people, but only two that seemed to make the news:

a legally armed Euro-American (possibly a former CIA agent, CIA would not confirm or deny) who when stopped for a normal traffic violation by the police, did not show his CCW card to the officer and then bolted and after a chase, when stopped a second time began making movements in the car as if he was "getting his gun".

a Euro-American male was shot and killed by a police officer in a struggle with the police officer, when it was reported the victim grabbed the police officer's taser. The girlfriend reported that the victim only knocked the taser out of the officers holster.

In 2007 a Houston police officer shot and killed a African-American man who had just shot him with the police officers taser. One witness reported that he was handcuffed when shot.

Houston is five times bigger than Las Vegas. Maybe its just luck.

[UpTheIrons]

Someone please correct me if I'm not remembering correctly, but I recall from one article I read somewhere that one of the LV officers involved in that Costco shooting had already previously shot and killed at least a couple of other people in just 5 years on the force and that this is his third fatal shooting in that time. Lots of officers serve 20 years without ever firing a shot in anger. So the officer in question is a statistical anomaly. I'm not saying this one officer's statistics are indicative of all LV officers, but I am saying that the LVPD are certainly guilty of retaining the services of someone who probably isn't psychiatrically suited for police work.... ....and instead of looking deeper into his fitness for duty, they are jumping through hoops to protect him from further scrutiny.

Something stinks about that.

I'm not saying the LVPD guy is in any way "in the clear" for being involved in 3 officer-involved shootings in his tenure, but there are some cops who are involved in more. A lot more. Jim Cirillo of the NYPD Stake-Out Squad was involved in 17 shootings and 250 armed encounters from 1968-1973. Granted, he was mixing it up with the worst-of-the-worst in the crime world so this may not be an apples-to-apples comparison, but it is informative, I think.

I hear over and over again about Cirillo on a few of the podcasts I listen to frequently, and it was difficult to find more than anecdotal evidence of his police work, but here's one that covers some of it:
http://www.snubnose.info/wordpress/news ... car-wreck/

I still believe there is something very, very wrong about the whole Erik Scott affair, and I hope that it all comes out sooner rather than later. Bad apples on the PD? Make them gone and make them pay.

[seamusTX]

... a knife holding mentally ill Euro-American 15 year old boy who was threatening his mom at home was shot and killed by police arriving after being called by the mom to help her with her son.

We need to maintain some balance here.

The duty of the police does not include getting themselves killed by armed, mentally deranged or intoxicated people. Someone who is so "troubled" as to threaten police with a weapon has really put himself on the spot.

And a 15-year-old male can easily be the size of an adult with more aggressiveness and less self-restraint.

We had a similar incident here. Some people called the cops about a relative who was threatening them. When the cops showed up, the man ran at the cops with a knife in each hand. The cops shot him.

What else are they supposed to do?

These incidents are sometimes related in a way that makes the police look bad, possibly for anti-police, anti-self-defense, or racial motivations, often involving a lawsuit against a police agency.

The mainstream media sometimes buys into these agendas, sometimes without realizing what they are doing.

- Jim

[philip964]

... a knife holding mentally ill Euro-American 15 year old boy who was threatening his mom at home was shot and killed by police arriving after being called by the mom to help her with her son.

We need to maintain some balance here.

The duty of the police does not include getting themselves killed by armed, mentally deranged or intoxicated people. Someone who is so "troubled" as to threaten police with a weapon has really put himself on the spot.

And a 15-year-old male can easily be the size of an adult with more aggressiveness and less self-restraint.

We had a similar incident here. Some people called the cops about a relative who was threatening them. When the cops showed up, the man ran at the cops with a knife in each hand. The cops shot him.

What else are they supposed to do?

These incidents are sometimes related in a way that makes the police look bad, possibly for anti-police, anti-self-defense, or racial motivations, often involving a lawsuit against a police agency.

The mainstream media sometimes buys into these agendas, sometimes without realizing what they are doing.

- Jim

I believe the mom called for the police to help her with her son, she did not expect the police to come and kill him.

In Houston, "HPD created the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) in the late 1990s in response to a widely publicized fatal shooting of a mentally ill woman near the George R. Brown Convention Center. Officers surrounded the woman, who was armed with a knife, but no one was specially trained to deal with mentally disturbed people and officers ended up killing her on the roadway."

That has not stopped the mentally ill from being killed by the police in Houston, in 2007 the SWAT team killed a mentally ill man with a hammer after the CIT officer failed to get a mentally ill man to surrender. In the civil trial the judges called the incident "troubling" but did find for the police. Dealing with the mentally ill is difficult, for everyone, including the police.

To answer your question about "what else were they suppose to do" Use their taser. In this case the officer fired to protect the mom, the officer's life was apparently not in danger at that moment. I guess since the boy and the mom were not close enough to worry about shooting the mom, it would seem a taser would be at least a first option.

But in this case hindsight is 20/20.

[seamusTX]

I have mixed feelings about this kind of issue.

The police are not there to "help" with mentally ill people. If at all possible, the police should take them into custody and transfer them to a suitable facility.

Maybe some police officers have a "shoot first" mentality when faced with someone who is having a loud argument with the voices in his head; but as I wrote earlier, their duty does not including putting their own life at risk.

- Jim

[philip964]

This happened just the other day in a suburb of Las Vegas. The comparisons are striking when compared to Las Vegas.

http://pvtimes.com/news/shooting-victim ... s-charges/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Ameer]

This happened just the other day in a suburb of Las Vegas. The comparisons are striking when compared to Las Vegas.

http://pvtimes.com/news/shooting-victim ... s-charges/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Maybe the cops in Pahrump got trained at the shooting school in Pahrump and have more skill and confidence.