Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Metro officers training Jordanians

Under a shroud of secrecy, Metro Police SWAT officials trained a group of officers from the Jordanian National Police in specialized tactics last month, said Deputy Chief Bill Conger, the man in charge of Metro's special operations bureau.

The Jordanian government wanted their officers trained "to overcome some of the terrorist activity" in their country, Conger said.

It was the first time Metro has worked with police officers from Jordan -- a strong ally of the United States -- but the department has trained police from other foreign nations in the same tactics, he said.

Because of the nature of the training, Conger declined to say much about it other than it's "very specialized" and that Metro is just one of a handful of police departments in the United States that has this expertise.

The safety of police officers could be compromised if details of these tactics were widely known, he explained.

The federal government approached Metro officials earlier this year about training some police officers from Jordan "to overcome terrorist activity," Conger said.

Metro brass agreed, but only if the department was to incur no expense.

The Jordanian police officers traveled to Las Vegas, stayed in a hotel and received eight days of training by Metro, and the federal government paid for all of it, Conger said. He declined to say how many police officers were trained.

"We even had them pay for the gasoline" used to get the officers to and from the training, Conger said.

While the language of Jordan is Arabic, most Jordanians speak English, according to the Embassy of Jordan website. Even so, a translator was on hand during the training.

Given the volatility in the Middle East, there "was some question (as to whether) we were training the right people," Conger said.

"There were a significant number of protocols to make sure things were on the up and up," he said. The federal government did background checks on all the Jordanian officers before they came to Las Vegas.

Monday, Jordan's King Abdullah II spoke to the New York Police Department's supervising officers about terrorism and international affairs, according to press reports.

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