Metro’s Finest

I’ve made a conscious effort to lay off Las Vegas Metro Police lately.

Is it because I realize that I have been wrong all along, and think that I have been misguided?

No.

It’s because I don’t want to get my scull cracked by a nightstick and have a gun shoved up my ass.

I mean this with all sincerity and not an ounce of humor … the cops here scare me. I actually fear them, and go out of my way to avoid them.

The LVMPD is a street gang sanctioned by the city, and they frequently harass people for questionable reasons.

During this past Winter, I had several acquaintances repeatedly tell me about how they were stopped and questioned, but given no ticket. It seemed to be happening several times per week. They would be driving along normally, and would see lights in the rear view mirror, and the theme was always very similar. The cops would say things such as “You look nervous, do you have something to hide, where are you headed, why are you headed there”, etc. I was told that the particular thing they kept repeating was”Why do you look nervous?”

One particular buddy of mine who was stopped near the Hilton was a 51 year old Jewish man in a BMW. The cop kept asking him “Why do you look nervous?” as well.

My friend looks about as gangster and threatening as Woody Allen.

He looked nervous because a guy with a gun kept asking him why he looked nervous. I can’t say I blame him.

They didn’t only harass the drivers, but everyone in the car. The cops would ask the passengers if they had ever been in trouble with the law, asked them their names, where they were going, what their relationship was with the driver, etc.

And none of the people even remotely looked like trouble makers. The whole thing was utterly bizarre, and they terrorized the east side of the near-Strip for a good two months.

And the weird thing is that the people who were stopped were never issued a ticket.

The whole thing piqued my curiosity, and I looked around to see if I could find an explanation for these occurrences, and someone finally clued me in as to what was going on.

Apparently, earlier this year, Metro Police graduated a new class of rookies. In order to prepare themselves for the streets, they were ordered to go out and intimidate random citizens in order to “build their confidence”.

Not to instill our confidence in them. Oh no, the impression left on the people they were sworn to protect and serve was very negative. Nobody felt safer, but rather … disillusioned.

These rookies weren’t necessarily supposed to issue citations, just practice interrogation at random. And more often than not, at least in my opinion, they picked out the least threatening people they could find to perform this exercise.

My guess is that they did this to minimize the chance that they would actually get injured during this on the job dickhead bully training.

Don’t stop the lolo without a license plate full of people wearing red bananas and throwing up gang signs, they might really be dangerous. Get the old guy in the BMW. That way you can build your confidence, and go back to the station house and tell the boys about how you made the rich guy nervous.

Feel safer yet?

Yeah, me either.

To “protect and serve” my ass.

You won’t find any of this information in the Review Journal, they are too busy peddling geriatric porn!

But I digress …

Seriously, what kind of way is that to treat the people who are supposed to look up to you and have confidence in you?

I just don’t trust the cops in this town, or the adjacent towns (Henderson and North Las Vegas). They always seem very confrontational, unprofessional, unintelligent, and don’t seem to have the slightest idea of what the law is. I have no idea how law enforcement “enforces” laws which they do not understand.

I owned a motor scooter (similar to a Vespa), and know several people who owned similar machines that were stopped by Metro constantly. They were issued a ticket for driving the scooters without a license plate. The problem is, by law they don’t have to have one, and not only that, but the Nevada DMV won’t issue license plates to 49cc scooters. The cops know this. But they ticket riders anyway?

Why?

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The riders have to go to court and show the judge the paper that says it’s 49cc’s, and the case is thrown out … and then the next day, Metro tickets them again … rinse and repeat.

The judges never issue injunctions against cops to stop writing the tickets. Why? They all get paid by the same ticket revenue. It’s a very corrupt town, what can I tell you …

Unless you want to spend your life in court, paying off the extortion is part of scooter ownership in this town. Many people just factor that into the yearly cost. And it’s wrong.

The cops get to harass someone for an illegal reason, raise some revenue (if the rider can’t make the court dates), and while they are messing around with simple scooter riders, Rapey McMurderface is running rampant through the Valley doing god knows what to god knows who.

BTW, you can thank Becky for the name “Rapey McMurderface”. (inside joke)

These ass jockey cops from last year don’t even know what Nevada’s legal definition of a “motorcycle” is … even though they ride one!

An-y-way … where is all of this going?

I’ll tell you.

We were driving up The Boulevard last night at about 7pm, on our way to dinner at the Main Street Station Buffet (review later). We took the fork left off of the Boulevard, and hit 4th street, which as most people know is a one-way street.

When we hit the stoplight at Charleston, we saw what appeared to be truck going in the wrong direction. As it got closer and closer, we realized that yes … indeed a vehicle was traveling the wrong way down a one way street. Drunk? Stupid? Unable to read signs? Who knows.

But it was absolutely unsafe.

Just when the truck made it to the intersection, a cop pulled up to the light on Charleston. The wrong-way truck was right in front of the cop.

“That guy is going to get a sobriety test”, I said. And we watched and waited for the lights to come on.

But no lights came on.

Instead, the cop car made a right turn, and proceeded up 4th.

I said “He must be waiting to make a U-Turn to get behind the truck”, but it never happened.

The cop car just disappeared into the distance, and I pulled out my little pocket camera when it was obvious that the cop wasn’t coming back for the guy driving the wrong way on a one-way street.

The only thing I can think of, is that the cop was eagerly driving off to shoot an ice cream lady, and didn’t have time to protect us from threats not related to frozen treats.

I still don’t get it. There is no rhyme or reason to it. They’ll either harass people for nothing, or watch as people endanger the lives of others before their very eyes, and ignore it.

To call the LVMPD “unpredictable” is an understatement. There is no consistency whatsoever. And that is another part of what scares me.

“But Rex, if someone robbed your house, wouldn’t you be the first one to call the cops?”

NO!

I have had all manners of things stolen in this town, and have never called the cops. Not once. First of all, there is no point since the cops don’t look for anything and don’t care because looking for stuff does not raise revenue. Second of all, I would be afraid the cops would come over and steal something else, or beat me senseless because I looked at them wrong, or plant crack on me to teach me a lesson about writing about cops on the Internet.

Even if I was shot or stabbed, I wouldn’t call them. I would call an ambulance, but I wouldn’t call the cops.

Why?

Because I would not want to get shot and stabbed again … or have someone repeatedly ask me why I looked nervous.

If I have a problem with street violence, I am calling one person, and one person only … and I think we all know who that person is:

Oh yeah, I see your heads bobbing through the computer monitor, do not try to front like you aren’t down with the Snoop Deee Ooooh Double Geee.

Anyway, this is my last post about the cops for awhile. I don’t want to antagonize them too much.

Yes, I am paranoid, but if you lived here, you just might be too.