Independent review necessary to study deadly shootings

If anyone doubted the veracity of the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s “Deadly Force” series, the tragic shooting of the troubled Stanley Gibson on Monday was confirmation of the newspaper’s major findings in November.

Finding: Officers involved in lethal shootings often have had other complaints filed against them, and police officials are reluctant to take action against them.

Fact: Jesus Arevalo, the only officer to fire his weapon in the Gibson shooting and a nearly nine-year veteran, has had citizen complaints, and supervisors have complained about his job performance, according to R-J sources. The department’s solution: Move him to an area with less crime.

 Finding: Blacks make up less than 10 percent of Clark County’s population, yet represent about 30 percent of all Las Vegas police shooting subjects.

Fact: Gibson, 43, a Gulf War veteran with mental issues and believed to be delusional when he was shot, was black. Gibson was in his car, unarmed, and his car was pinned between two police vehicles, going nowhere, when he was shot and killed.

Finding: Out of 16 large police forces, Las Vegas police rank third behind Houston and Chicago in officer-involved shootings per capita.

Fact: Gibson was the 12th fatality by Las Vegas police this year, already a record, and the year isn’t over.

With numbers like this, we might overtake Chicago.

Will the feds come in to examine this pattern? Let’s hope so.

An independent, professional review is necessary to look at both the before and the after in these deadly shootings.

The Las Vegas Police Protective Association is working as an obstructionist, blocking reforms the Clark County Commission approved for coroner’s inquests, which have becoming nonexistent because officers won’t answer questions fearing self-incrimination.

Sheriff Doug Gillespie can’t handle this internally. It’s just not possible. He was savvy to say Thursday he welcomed a federal investigation into the shootings by police officers and doesn’t consider it adversarial.

Gibson’s shooting appears to have even more complexities and more agencies to question. His treatment by the Department of Veterans Affairs deserves close scrutiny as well.

There appears to have been a communication breakdown between the supervisors trying to stop Gibson by firing a beanbag shotgun, which wouldn’t have been lethal, and Arevalo, who might have begun firing at Gibson when he heard the beanbag shotgun fired. Arevalo and three others were involved in the shooting, but he fired the fatal shots with a rifle. All four are on administrative leave.

Gillespie is right on one point. If people followed a police officer’s commands, these fatalities would be a more infrequent occurrence. But Gibson apparently was delusional, lost, trying to find his way home.

And not every police officer’s command is righteous. The same day Gibson was killed, Gillespie fired Derek Colling, a police officer who had commanded a man to stop videotaping him and beat him for not obeying. After the scuffle, it took eight months to investigate what seemed obvious, that Colling was way out of line.

Colling has been on paid leave since April 1, and it took eight months before his firing.

Another bad apple left unchecked? During his 5½ years as a Las Vegas police officer, Colling was involved in two fatal shootings, one in 2006, the second in 2009. That’s when he shot and killed a mentally ill 15-year-old who was holding a knife at his mother’s neck. (I remember thinking at the time that the news media and public would be tearing him apart if the officer had done nothing, and the teen murdered his mother and tried to put myself in his place.)

While I don’t want officers to be afraid to pull their weapons, something is amiss in Las Vegas.

Other cities, including Denver and Portland, Ore., have lowered their numbers of officer-involved shootings.

It’s not an impossible dream.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Email her
at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call her at
(702) 383-0275. She also blogs
at lvrj.com/blogs/Morrison