Editorial: Suspension was too light

Monday, April 4, 2005 | 9:11 a.m.

Two Metro Police officers withheld information at a preliminary hearing that would have cleared a suspect of a drug charge. After reviewing the facts, the Citizen Review Board, an independent agency that reviews controversial police actions, recommended that the officers be fired. The Metro Police Internal Affairs Division also reviewed the facts. It also found that the officers failed in their duty, but concluded that their failure did not warrant dismissal. The officers were subsequently suspended without pay.

Their discipline resulted from a bizarre series of events that started on a night in July 2004. A man named Mark Lilly approached some people at Main Street and Carson Avenue in Las Vegas. Not realizing they were police officers, he asked them if they wanted to buy some drugs. The officers searched Lilly's car and turned up a substance that looked like drugs, but wasn't. There's a law, however, against trying to sell fake drugs, so Lilly was arrested.

Kevin Collmar, David Parker and David Newton were among the Metro officers Lilly had approached. Newton said he placed some real drugs in Lilly's car after the arrest, as a training exercise for their police dog. According to Newton, after the exercise he forgot to remove the drugs. Later, during a police inventory search of Lilly's car, the drugs were found and an additional -- and more serious -- charge of possession of a controlled substance was lodged against Lilly.

Newton learned of the additional charge and filled out paperwork that would have absolved Lilly -- if only it had been sent to the district attorney's office. Instead, it was placed in a file where no one could act on it. Collmar and Parker were later subpoenaed to testify at Lilly's preliminary hearing. "The officers knew this person should not be prosecuted for anything having to do with the narcotics found in the vehicle," Deputy Chief Mike Ault, who oversees internal affairs, told the Sun in February, after the review board had called for their firing. "They went through the testimony process without disclosing that."

After Lilly was bound over for trial, another officer who was present the night Lilly was arrested called the district attorney's office and reported the true circumstances of how the drugs got into the car. The narcotics charge against Lilly was dismissed. Nevertheless, Lilly filed complaints with the Citizen Review Board and the Internal Affairs Division.

We are dumbfounded that Ault's division, in a ruling last week, concluded that only a suspension was warranted for Officers Collmar and Parker. Equally disturbing was Metro's refusal to disclose the length of the suspension. Was it a month? A week? A day? Ault told the Sun that his investigators "simply did not find" that the officers' omissions amounted to lying. We couldn't disagree more. The officers violated Lilly's rights and betrayed the public's trust. They should be fired.