Police review board mired in controversy

Erin Neff and Adrienne Packer

Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2000 | 11:23 a.m.

Controversy has accompanied every step in the formation of a Citizen Review Board for Metro Police.

The announcement of the 25 board members last week was no different as ACLU Director Gary Peck questioned why city of Las Vegas and Clark County officials packed the panel with so many people with ties to government.

The panel includes a mix of community members, from teachers and attorneys to school principals and businessmen. Five members of the board have law enforcement backgrounds, a sixth is a security officer and a seventh works for the county fire department.

"Reasonable people could look at this board and be skeptical of that," Peck said. "Reasonable people could say this board does not inspire confidence that they will be independent and fair and free from Metro influence."

Peck also was "dismayed" that appointments were made without personal interviews and without respect to race or ethnicity.

But elected officials disagreed, saying the board was created carefully.

"We are submitting a cadre of citizens that is well representative of the community and ethnically diverse," said Las Vegas City Councilwoman Lynette Boggs McDonald, one of four members of Metro's Fiscal Affairs Committee.

"The ACLU was a part of the process on how we should proceed," Boggs McDonald added. "On the issue of race and gender -- they, when they had the opportunity to write the rules, should have made that a part of the selective process.

"We didn't write the rules," she said. "We followed the rules that were given us."

A diverse committee of community leaders, including the ACLU, Metro Police and the NAACP, met for more than a year under the leadership of federal public defender Frannie Forsman to craft the ordinance that would create the review board.

The committee reached a compromise that allowed for up to five panelists to be ex-law enforcement officers.

The officer-involved shooting of Daniel Mendoza in 1996 and other high-profile police shooting cases in which officers were vindicated by Metro's Internal Affairs office or a coroner's inquest led to public outcry for a citizen's panel.

Councilman Gary Reese, the city's other Fiscal Affairs Committee representative, said he's convinced the 12 people appointed by the city will do a good job.

"There's always going to be some people that have negative comments," Reese said. "I tried to allow input from the other board members that I sit with on the council. I think that we have a good mix."

But Peck said packing the board with "institutional" people leads to the public's perception that the panel has allegiances to Metro.

"I don't see any waitresses, I don't see any carpenters, I don't see anybody who is active in West Las Vegas," Peck said.

Clark County Commissioner Dario Herrera, who also sits on Metro's Fiscal Affairs Committee, said various organizations including the ACLU were asked to be a part of the selection process but few obliged.

"For them to pretend they didn't have a voice in the process is a personal insult to me," Herrera said. "I had an open-door policy. I asked for input as far as appointments and received very little."

Herrera said he believes the review committee is diverse when it comes to professions, ethnicity and gender. The fact that the number of law enforcement officers met the maximum limit was by coincidence.