The Justice in Policing Act's impact on Las Vegas police department reform

1. Research the Las Vegas, NV police department and the impact by a recent regulation, court decision, legislative actions, court decisions, regulatory and statutory changes and laws, and ordinances. The recent racial and political tensions that occurred as a result of the George Floyd murder, have impacted many police department across the nation including Las Vegas (Eliot, 2020). The court has been heavily impacted by the Justice in Policing Act of 2020. This act looks to reform the Las Vegas police department by first holding departments accountable for police misconduct, excessive force, and racial bias (Greenhouse, 2020). This act includes provision that will ultimately help improve the oversight by leadership within the Las Vegas police department. The act also restricts use of certain deadly techniques such as chokeholds and use of deadly force. Currently, the George Floyd Law Enforcement Trust and Integrity Act is currently be proposed. This bill also has the potential to impact the Las Vegas police department. Here, the bill will look to introduce national policing standards and accreditations. The legislation will also call for the Las Vegas police department to share data with the Department of Justice. The law will also look to issue grants to help implement new oversight procedures. Although not signed into law, it could potentially impact the Las Vegas police department (Connor, 2018) 2. Analyze how the legislative actions, court decisions, regulatory and statutory changes and laws, and ordinances impact the department’s procedures, policies, and operations. The first major impact will be related to overall policing costs. The costs of proper training, oversight, and adherence to procedures will be costly. Legislation and court decisions will also impact decisions on how to properly police certain areas. This can negatively impact the overall police force as the police may be apprehensive to do their jobs due to racial or political tensions. This could potentially impact the overall efficiency of the police department and its ability to keep the public safe. 3. Conduct a needs assessment to determine how the department can best implement changes to their procedures, policies, and operations based on the directives. Needs Assessment

Minority Hires Look to attract, hire, and retain cope tent minority candidates through college and professional recruitment agencies

Cultural and Diversity Training Train existing officers to the relevant cultures within the Las Vegas community

Use of Lethal Force Train officers on the use of legal force, and how to properly de-escalate a situation with a potential criminal.

4. You are making the assumption that increasing the number of sworn personnel in the field will not have a positive impact on crime in a given community. Create a plan for reducing crime in urban zones? As it relates to sworn personal and their ability to reduce crime, there is not a strong correlation between the two. For one new law enforcement can be incompetent and not provide the added security that society would expect. In addition, simply added police officers with properly deploying them is also an inefficient use of state funds. It is much more efficient for police departments to streamline operations to make their existing police force much more efficient. This reduced crime in a litany of ways. First, by simply hiring more officers, these officers will need to be trained to not only do their job correctly but also navigate a particularly contentious racial and pollical environment (Sloan, 1992). In addition, to even hire police officers, a very long and arduous vetting process is needed. Aspects such as background checks, psychological tests, fitness evaluations and more are all part of the hiring process. This can significantly delay officers from even being deployed into operations to help reduced crime. Even if they are deployed quickly, there are no assurances that the police officers will perform well in the field. As we have seen with the George Floyd incident even seasoned police veterans can harbor significant even within the. Here, not only did an officer kneel on the neck of George Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until his death, he was also accompanied by three junior officers who did nothing to help mitigate the situation. In this instance, the additional officers didn’t decrease crime, they actually increased crime as more residents began to protest in response to incompetent police officers. As such, the plan will look to increase efficiencies associated with higher usage of technology and other innovations. To begin the plan for reducing crime in urban zones will involve a much more efficient use of deploying police officers. Here the technology component will be segregated into two components. The first component will be related to hard and soft technological innovations. The hard innovation component of the plan will detail use of technology used to deter crime in urban zones. For example, the plan will call for the increase use of the CCTV cameras in high crime or high-risk areas. The plan will call for increase use of metal detectors in schools, bullet proof teller windows at banks, and security systems in homes and businesses. Due to the political and racial climate prevailing, the plan will also include provisions for less than lethal force devices, new technology-enhanced patrol cars, and new police protective gear. The primary focus of the hard technology solution is to better leverage the existing police force and empower then in an efficient manner. The prevention phase pertains to hard technology that gathers appropriate data that can be used and analyzed. This analysis can be used through the soft technology solutions outlined below to development risk assessments and threat assessments in the urban crime zones. Through these assessments, the police departments can be mobilized in a much more efficient manner. For example, through risk assessments, and linear programming, the police force can determine the likelihood of a crime in a particular area, where the crime is likely to occur, and deploy officers in the most efficient manner. The solutions such as CCTV cameras can provide 24-hour monitoring that can feed data to programs and provide real time updates to the police department. Once deployed, officers will be equipped with less than lethal devices and trained on how to deescalate and combat racial tensions that may occur. The soft technology innovations will detail how the plan will utilize technology to increase efficiencies within the department. The primary aim of these segment of the plan is to improvement overall performance of the police through technology. The soft technology portion of the plan is designed to complement the hard technology innovations portion. As described above, the solution will look to use predictive policing technology, recording, video streaming, and artificial intelligence to make the police force much more efficient. Here the hard-technological innovations used various solutions to gather data, while the soft innovations are used by police departments to arrive at a solution. For example, software solutions can help lower processing time to allow criminals to be quickly and efficiently detained, prosecuted, and/or jailed. Artificial intelligence will allow police departments to better align officer workload during periods were crime is likely to occur. Through 24 hours surveillance described in the section above, police department will have a method of procuring continuous data feeds. These data feeds can then power software programs that can used analytics to predict crime within the urban crime zone. Linear programming technology can be used to deploy officers in the most efficient and timely manner to a crime scene. Table 1 presents the hard and soft technology solutions that will be deployed to reduced crime within the urban crime zone. Table 1 – Plan to Reduce Crime in Urban Zones