Las Vegas, NV- A five part report shows the need to investigate officer-involved shooting deaths.

In the wake of two controversial officer-involved shooting deaths in the summer of 2010, the Review-Journal set out to analyze two decades of shootings by officers from the Las Vegas Valley's five major law enforcement agencies: the Las Vegas, Henderson and North Las Vegas police departments, the Nevada Highway Patrol and Clark County School District police.

The newspaper obtained police reports, coroner's inquest transcripts, civil and criminal court files and other records. It interviewed police officers, relatives of those who have died and experts in police training and administration.

Each police shooting in the region -- 378 since Jan. 1, 1990; 142 resulting in death, 114 resulting in known wounds -- is reflected in a searchable online database, with original documents and, in some cases, videotaped re-enactments by police, linked in a permanent public archive.

While information about all five police agencies was analyzed, the focus of the Review-Journal investigation was the Metropolitan Police Department, Nevada's largest law enforcement agency with 2,700 officers policing 1.3 million people. Las Vegas police were involved in 310 shootings in the more than 20 years surveyed.

Until now, debate has focused on individual incidents rather than systemic issues that help determine when, where, how and why shootings happen.

What the newspaper found was an insular department that is slow to weed out problem cops and is slower still to adopt policies and procedures that protect both its own officers and the citizens they serve. It is an agency that celebrates a hard-charging police culture while often failing to learn from its mistakes.

Nowhere is the problem more obvious than in the workings of the department's Use of Force Review Board, a panel of officers and civilians that has cleared more than 97 percent of the more than 500 cases of shootings and other officer use of force incidents it has reviewed since 1991. Even officers such as Pease -- who show patterns of poor judgment and multiple lapses in police procedure with fatal consequences -- rarely face discipline when they shoot and kill.

Shootings in Clark County vary greatly from year to year but have generally increased over time, from just two in 1990 to a record 31 last year, 25 of them involving Las Vegas police officers.

While it's tempting to blame the rising numbers on the region's rapid growth, there's no clear relationship between population and shootings. Nor is there a clear relationship with violent crime, which has fallen each year since 2008 even as shootings have increased.

In an average year since 2000, Las Vegas police fire their weapons 17 times. So far this year it's been 16.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/always-justified/investigation-of-officer-involved-shootings-focuses-on-southern-nevada-law-enforcement-134253648.html


Part 2 - Analysis of cases since 1990 reveals patterns in Las Vegas police shootings.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/142-dead-and-rising/

Part 3 - Law enforcement culture, training calls for coming on strong to end situations.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/slow-to-change/law-enforcement-culture-training-calls-for-coming-on-strong-to-end-situations-134259678.html

Part 4 - Coroner's inquests undercut by prosecutorial inaction, deference to police.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/broken-system-shattered-lives/coroner-s-inquests-undercut-by-prosecutorial-inaction-deference-to-police-134261653.html

Part 5 - Cities find ways to reduce deadly confrontations with police, preserve safety.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/better-ways/cities-find-ways-to-reduce-deadly-confrontations-with-police-preserve-safety-134262423.html