Poll: Sheriff earns rave reviews; residents want more officers

Thursday, Sept. 23, 1999 | 11:13 a.m.

Sheriff Jerry Keller earned a glowing job performance review in a local poll that also revealed an appetite for more Metro Police.

But a question that asked respondents to reveal how safe they felt in the county compared with three years ago proved inconclusive. Those results were part of the Las Vegas Sun/Las Vegas 1 poll of Metro conducted by the UNLV Cannon Center for Survey Research. The random telephone poll of 401 adults living in Metro's service area -- Las Vegas and unincorporated parts of the county -- had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points. North Las Vegas and Henderson have their own police forces.

By a margin of nearly 7 to 1, respondents rated Keller's job performance good to excellent versus poor to very poor. About one-fourth of those polled were neutral.

Keller won re-election to a second four-year term in a 1998 landslide in which he faced weak, under-funded opposition. He received his strongest ratings in the poll from older respondents and from residents who have lived in the county at least five years.

"I believe this is more a reflection of the performance of the men and women of Metro," Keller said. "This obviously shows that the community has confidence in the agency. While I certainly am flattered by this the reality is it's really a measure of the agency, not me, and I'm proud of that."

Pam Gallion, interim director of the Cannon Center, said that both Keller and his agency should be pleased by his job performance rating. But she cautioned that some respondents may have been reluctant to give him a poor rating, possibly out of fear that their answer would be held against them by police even though their names weren't asked for in the poll.

About 48 percent of the respondents believed Metro needed more officers, versus 39 percent who disagreed and 13 percent who had no opinion. Voters approved a ballot initiative in 1996 to add 450 officers to Metro, a five-year plan the agency is in the midst of completing.

When asked if there were enough Metro Police, 49 percent of the women and 46 percent of the men answered no. Also answering negatively were 52 percent of the Hispanics, 48 percent of the whites, 47 percent of the Asian-Americans and 42 percent of the blacks.

Slightly more than half of the respondents aged 18 to 34 believed that Metro already had enough officers, while all other adults were less willing to agree. This was particularly true of those aged 49 to 62, less than one-third of whom believed there were enough officers. About 46 percent of the respondents who have lived in town less than five years also believed there were enough officers, but only 37 percent of the longer-term residents agreed with that position.

Gallion said she wasn't surprised that younger respondents believed Metro already had enough officers. The poll consistently showed that individuals aged 18 to 34 were less apt than older respondents to support police.

Keller agreed that he could use more officers, but he said no particular division of the agency is more deficient than others in terms of personnel. His goal is to have about two officers per 1,000 residents. The agency now has 1.8 officers per 1,000 residents.

"I would love to have two more squads in vice," Keller said. "I'd love to have 50 more guys on motorcycles. I'd love to have 200 more cops in every area command. I'd love to have more detectives. Homicide is getting stretched thin."

Metro conducts five police academies annually and graduates 200 to 225 new officers each year.

"We have an (annual) attrition rate of 50 so we are adding constantly to keep up with growth," Keller said. "We're still behind what we need. But cops don't grow on trees."

Metro is currently short 216 of the 1,804 commissioned police officers it is authorized. The current police academy will add 55 officers to the force, and another 65 will enter the academy in October. Another 45 openings will be filled by academies early next year.

On the question of safety, 30 percent of the poll respondents said they feel less safe than they used to here and 20 percent said they felt safer. But the largest grouping, 47 percent, said they felt no difference. Gallion said that this response proved inconclusive.

Men tended to feel somewhat safer than did women. The youngest respondents also felt the safest, while individuals aged 35 to 48 indicated they felt less safe than any other age group. Whites also tended to feel less safe, while blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans were split. New residents tended to feel safest, while residents who have lived in town at least 26 years said they feel least safe.

But Keller lashed out at the media, blaming it for promoting fear because of the high volume of crime coverage. He argued that the county is much safer today than in past years. Even though growth has produced a higher volume of crime, the sheriff said that per capita crime rates have dropped sharply over the past five years.

"Every news broadcast, every newspaper leads with crime," Keller said. "In fact, crime is down almost 50 percent in five years but the coverage by the media is up. They show the heartbreak, the blood and gore and when they do that that creates fear. And fear of crime and reality of crime are two different things."

He cited one study that placed Las Vegas' crime rate at 205th for cities of at least 75,000, a vast improvement from the time decades ago when he said the city consistently ranked in the top three nationally.

"That says the police department and the public are working together to make a difference," Keller said. "There's not a single neighborhood where we've gone in and worked with the neighbors that we haven't been able to make a positive difference.

"Have we wrestled crime to the ground? No. My mission is to work myself out of a job. I would love this community to be crime-free. We're not quite there yet but we're making great progress."