Friday, April 21, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.
The video footage was chillingly graphic: a mob of more than a dozen youths viciously beating a Strip resort maintenance worker, swarming him while pummeling him with punches and kicks.
Las Vegas police wanted the public to see the video. They wanted the public's help in identifying the attackers. They just didn't want the public to know where it had happened.
Although Sheriff Bill Young has publicly apologized for his department's clumsy handling of the incident, the episode unearthed a gentleman's agreement of sorts between Metro police and Strip casinos - one showing that while "What happens here, stays here" is a clever advertising slogan, when it comes to police work, Joe Friday's "Just the facts, ma'am" approach almost always is better.
At a news conference Monday about the beating, one of six violent attacks on Las Vegans over the weekend by what Metro police have called a "wolf pack" mob, Capt. David O'Leary declined to identify where the captured-on-tape attack had occurred.
It did not take the press long to figure out that the crime scene was the MGM Grand - not because of aggressive sleuthing by reporters, but because a press release announcing the press conference where police refused to say where the beating occurred mentioned the MGM.
But by standing in front of a bank of microphones and refusing to identify the site - and describing it only as a "resort property on the Strip corridor" - O'Leary made it seem that his department was more concerned with protecting a casino's image than with warning the public about the need to take extra care in a particular locale.
"What defies logic is how can we have a press conference, show video and then say, 'Sorry, we can't identify the location,' " Young said. "It's ridiculous. Ridiculous."
But it is also, Young acknowledges, not the only time Metro has handled how crime is publicly reported in a similar fashion.
For understandable reasons, casinos - and other businesses - prefer to keep their names out of the newspaper and off the TV news when it comes to crime. And Las Vegas police, for various reasons, sometimes play along.
Crime is bad for a casino's business, and that can be bad for tourism, which in turn can be bad for almost everyone in a town that runs on tourist dollars.
Young stresses that he makes no effort to downplay Strip crime, but concedes that on the street level, relationships between individual police officers and casino security run deep enough to sometimes constrain full disclosure.
"I'm sure those relationships sometimes lead to that," Young said, referring to the police's occasional withholding of specific business names where crimes occur. "There's usually a good reason for it, a good motivation behind it. This time, it was a mistake."
Although he publicly criticized O'Leary's decision to withhold MGM's name, Young went to lengths to praise him as a "solid, good officer," chalking up the controversy to a rookie captain's ill-advised attempt at achieving a perhaps hopeless goal: airing video of a crime without identifying the location.
Nevada Press Association Director Barry Smith said the only word he could come up with to describe the incident is "absurd."
"I can't think of a better word for it," Smith said. "That (incident) kind of confirms people's impression that the police department works for the casinos and not the public."
O'Leary explained later that he chose not to disclose the MGM Grand's identity because his primary objective was to get the video of the mob of unidentified suspects - footage captured on MGM security cameras - on television in time for news stations' 6 p.m. broadcasts, in the hope that viewers could put names to the grainy video faces.
"It was not about where the incident occurred but who was involved," O'Leary said. "The location was of no consequence. It's a red herring."
Former Clark County Sheriff Jerry Keller, now vice president of security for Wynn Resorts, said that under his watch, Metro sometimes withheld the names of businesses - not just casinos - where crimes occurred. The decision to handle those situations that way, he said, were consistent with Metro's "partnership" with the business community.
Most cases in which business names were not disclosed involved situations where the police investigation hinged on the identity of the suspects rather than the location of the crime, he said.
"It didn't happen a lot but it would happen sometimes because of what businesses perceived as negative publicity," Keller said.
"A crime is a crime regardless of geography, and sometimes the name of the business is not germane to investigation."
People planning a visit to a place where a mob beating recently occurred, however, might see it differently.
Selective disclosure of crime information, however seldom it occurs or how well-intentioned, also can leave the public with the impression that the police treat certain crimes - or at least certain crime scenes - differently.
"This (incident) leads to all sorts of problems, because a handshake understanding with certain businesses creates the impression on the part of the public that there is unequal treatment by police," said Alan Lichtenstein, attorney for the Nevada American Civil Liberties Union.
Even Young conceded that the police probably would not have made much effort to protect the location if the incident had occurred at "the corner of D and Jackson," an intersection in a high-crime Las Vegas neighborhood.
Metro Lt. Ted Snodgrass said he sometimes withholds a name or specific address out of respect for the business or person involved, but dismissed any suggestion that police protect the casinos from bad press as "nonsense."
"It's not like I'm the censor," Snodgrass said. "I don't want to focus on the property as much as I do the crime."
Moreover, while police officers may limit what they say to individual reporters or at a press conference, the details on which they are mum - a business' name or location - are included in police reports, which are accessible to the public as a matter of law, Snodgrass noted.
MGM Mirage's policy is to contact Metro for assistance with any major crimes on casino property, but smaller criminal incidents are managed by casino security, said Gordon Absher, vice president of public affairs for the gaming corporation.
As of Thursday, one arrest had been made in connection with the attack at the MGM.
Metro police traced the license plate of a car seen speeding away from the MGM Grand after the attack back to Daryle Williams. Young expects the 18-year-old to be the first of several arrests in the case.
And when those arrests are made, Young stressed, the public will know all about it.
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