Packed Fremont streets during day 3 of the Life is Beautiful music festival in Downtown Las Vegas Sunday, September 18, 2022. Brian Ramos
Sunday, Nov. 26, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Earlier this year, Ackeem Ramsay pleaded guilty and was sentenced for pandering, racking up $178 in fees and being placed on probation for no more than 24 months, according to documents from the Nevada Supreme Court.
Conditions of his probation included abiding by any curfews imposed by the Division of Parole and Probation, maintaining full-time employment or completing 16 hours of community service each month, and staying away from the Resort Corridor.
He didn’t realize his probation banned him from the Strip, and now he’s fighting back, claiming the move is unconstitutional.
“The order-out provisions are dangerously vague,” said Tia Smith, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Nevada, who signed on an amicus brief supporting Ramsay. “They open the door to dangerous profiling activities and further violations of Nevadans’ rights.”
In August 2022, Clark County passed an ordinance creating an “order-out corridor” that stretches across most of the Strip and some nearby properties like the Rio.
The Las Vegas City Council unanimously approved an ordinance recently that would allow its Municipal Court to establish an order-out corridor in two other major tourist areas — the Stratosphere at the north end of the Strip and Fremont Street downtown.
Chronic offenders are the target of these ordinances, City Attorney Jeff Dorocak said. Metro Police would be able to ban these people from these tourist corridors for repeated misdemeanors rather than put them in jail, he added.
A spokesman said Metro had arrested or cited 103 such violators in October alone on the Strip. It has led to “great success,” with reduced calls for service for nuisance and person crimes, according to Capt. Brandon Oris of Metro’s downtown area command.
“This really is a critical first step for us and it is only to protect everybody, including law enforcement,” said Mayor Carolyn Goodman, who sponsored the ordinance, which the council by a 6-0 vote adopted at its Nov. 15 meeting.
Smith, who attended the Nov. 15 meeting and told council members the ACLU was prepared to challenge the new ordinance, said the city’s order-out rule was “dangerously vague” because it doesn’t set solid exemptions and can be set on a case-by-case basis, leading to profiling.
Some exemptions for someone under the city’s order-out corridor could include those who live or need to work in the areas; those who need to seek medical or legal services in the areas; those who need to access federal, state and local social programs in the areas; those who attend religious services in the areas; those making a legal appearance in the areas; or those accessing public transportation in the areas.
The new ordinance states that “a court may impose an ‘order-out corridor,’ ” and that “the court may grant such exemptions from an order to stay out of the Order-Out Corridor as the court deems reasonable.”
“May” is the key word, and the root of some problems within the ordinance, Smith said.
“They don’t have to give you these exceptions, if they (don’t) want to,” Smith said. “It really infringes on a lot of these even just modern necessities, like people need to take Ubers, they need to go through these areas — not even necessarily to hang out and do criminal activities or whatever, (but) they’re just trying to live their lives and go from one place to another.”
The ordinance also doesn’t use the language “chronic offender” — whom public safety officials have said multiple times were the focus of the law. It only speaks of “a criminal offense that occurred or is alleged to have occurred within the order-out corridor.”
Along with impedingrights to freedom of speech and equal protections under the law, Smith explained that the order-out rule could shift crime into other neighborhoods because it isn’t targeting specific public safety concerns.
City council members and public safety officials discussed some of these common crimes during the Nov. 15 meeting.
The order-out corridor is ideally going to be used as a crime deterrent in tourist-populated areas, Goodman said.
Jason Potts, the chief of the department of public safety, said a systematic review conducted a few years ago revealed that 10% of all chronic offenders account for 60% of all crimes.
Councilmembers Nancy Brune and Olivia Diaz raised concerns the ordinance might just be moving the problem to areas outside the zones, including on Charleston Boulevard and the Arts District.
“My concern is you’re just pushing it to other commercial corridors, and I know businesses along Charleston have been suffering or suffering even more with just some additional traffic,” Brune said. “So, as a small-business advocate, I want to make sure we’re not just pushing this to businesses outside of some sort of arbitrary corridor and not supporting our small businesses that are outside of that corridor.”
Oris, the Metro captain, said anecdotally that businesses near Clark County’s order-out corridor didn’t experience any increase of crime, but he did not provide data during the meeting to support his contention.
Smith, too, said she believed crime would probably move to businesses beyond the order-out zones, and suggested that public safety officials use more targeted strategies to decrease such crimes.
For example, youth curfews — similar to what the Fremont Street Experience enacted last summer after a handful of shootings under and near the canopy — would work better, she explained.
Smith did not give a timeline for the ACLU to challenge the new city ordinance but said “litigation is definitely on the table.”
For now, the group is waiting a bit to see how the Nevada Supreme Court will rule on Ramsay’s challenge of the Clark County order-out ordinance.
“This ordinance is just way too overbroad, and includes way too many people and infringes on too many rights for us,” Smith said. “The legality of the county ordinance is currently being litigated before the Nevada Supreme Court, and so we don’t even know if these things are constitutional or not yet. So we’re definitely looking at all of our options right now.”
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