Hispanic community left out of talks on police shootings

Sunday, Jan. 14, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

The process of changing how to investigate police officers who in the line of duty shoot and kill citizens has found activist groups representing Hispanics, the Las Vegas Valley's largest minority, on the sidelines.

Both the five-month-old panel on reforming the coroner's inquest and two public meetings about the issue last week have been bereft of organizations representing the Hispanic community.

The situation adds up to an "all-around snubbing of the Hispanic community, a sad situation," said Fernando Romero, president of Hispanics in Politics, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The panel includes a government employee, Assistant Clark County Manager Elizabeth Quillin, who is of Mexican background.

But Quillin and local activists alike noted that there was no advocacy group on the panel to give input based on concerns gathered from the Hispanic community, an estimated 26 percent of the Clark County population.

Several activists said that the inquest, the procedure for reviewing deaths in which police officers are involved, is of vital concern to Hispanics, particularly because nearly one in four victims of lethal force since 2000 has been Hispanic.

During the past six years, of 70 so-called "officer-involved" shooting deaths, 16 of the victims - or 23 percent - were Hispanic. Twenty-three, or 33 percent, were black.

"The Latino community ... has a deep and abiding stake in how we deal with police shootings," said Gary Peck, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, a panel member.

The absence of Hispanic groups on the panel "sends a message to the community that those voices aren't important to be heard," Peck said.

Quillin, who helped put together the panel, said a decision was made to involve groups that had long been involved in coroner's inquests and to keep the panel as small as possible. Otherwise, Quillin said, "meaningful discussion about the issue would be difficult."

She said the ACLU, the Citizen's Review Board and the NAACP were chosen to be the three community groups on the panel, while its other members came from government agencies such as the district attorney, the attorney general, the sheriff and the coroner's office.

As for the absence of public participation from Hispanics at the meetings, several observers pointed to apathy or cynicism when it comes to offering input at such public events.

Adriana Arevalo - news director at Univision and a columnist for El Tiempo, one of two local Spanish-language weeklies - wrote in a Jan. 6 column that if the police want to build trust with the Hispanic community, Metro needs to consider alternatives to lethal force in cases such as the New Year's Day shooting of a knife-wielding Hispanic man.

"Make the people believe in the police again," Arevalo wrote, addressing recently elected Sheriff Doug Gillespie.

At the same time, she expressed disappointment in the Hispanic community for not weighing in on possible changes to the coroner's inquest.

"It's a cultural problem ... that Hispanics don't seek direct access to government agencies and such processes," she said.

Not only that, "we are the least informed and the largest minority group," she said.

Tony Sanchez, a member of the board of the Latin Chamber of Commerce, recalled how black and Hispanic groups - including the NAACP - joined during the recent campaign to elect a new sheriff and posed questions to candidates on the issues of lethal force and police brutality.

"It was a very big issue ... and there were questions from both communities," Sanchez said.

The absence of Hispanic involvement in the current process may be a sign of the difference in political sophistication between the black and Hispanic communities, he said.

"The African-American community has a 50-year history here," Sanchez said.

Still, Romero said the absence of the Hispanic community in the panel's work may jeopardize its final results - "particularly since by the nature of the community we don't trust law enforcement to begin with."