Both Metro Police veterans tout their decadeslong experience and leadership skills to next lead the mammoth 6,000-personnel agency, but neither wanted to face off against Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo in next year’s election.
So they each retired from the force to seek their luck elsewhere: one in the Nevada Legislature; and the other in the private sector.
Their thinking changed over the summer when Lombardo launched a bid to become the Republican nominee to run against Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak as he seeks a second term in November 2022.
“I wasn’t going to run against my old boss,” former Metro assistant sheriff and current Nevada Assemblyman Tom Roberts said. “I just have that much respect for him.
“I did not know for sure that (former Undersheriff Kevin) McMahill was going to run,” Roberts added. “However, I’d already made the decision, and I’m not backing out.”
McMahill said that before he retired in December 2020, he had been assured by Lombardo that he would seek a third term to remain Metro’s top cop.
“I really felt like I was not going to stick around for another six years as the undersheriff,” McMahill said. “And I truly believe that the sheriff needed to develop another team that was going to take him through that next six years.”
But then Lombardo reapproached him. “I want you to consider running for sheriff,” McMahill said Lombardo advised him. “And I didn’t hesitate — not for one second.”
McMahill stands to become the establishment candidate with endorsements from Lombardo and several previous sheriffs.
The tag doesn’t bother Roberts, who said he didn’t consider himself an underdog. For him, the choice comes down to leadership style and vision for the department.
“I’m not going to talk bad about Tom Roberts,” said McMahill, vowing to conduct a respectful campaign. “I’m going to tell people who I am and what I’ve done, and where I’m going to take Metro. And I hope they see that for what it is.
“I just happen to believe that I’m far more qualified for this position based on experience than he is,” McMahill added. “And that’s why I’m running for sheriff.”
Filing for elective office in Nevada opens in March, and McMahill and Roberts are the only ones who’ve emerged as candidates for sheriff.
Both sat down separately with the Sun’s editorial board to discuss their bona fides and their distinct stances on policing. The interviews were conducted Sept. 21-22.
How would your administration differ from that of Lombardo?
Roberts: I don’t have the same policing style or leadership style as Sheriff Lombardo, or McMahill for that matter. They’re very similar. I believe that there should be more transparency, allowing the public and media to sit in and provide input during compstat (crime analysis) meetings. You could get a lot of great ideas and a lot of feedback on how to police.
We don’t do a good enough job at leveraging all our community partners, including those in academia. We need to get back to neighborhood policing.
You talk to police officers on the street today, and a lot of them seem to be pulled in a lot of different directions, and we need police in our neighborhoods where they matter. Leaders should be out in public. You should be out with the men and women in the department, not holed up at Metro headquarters. Our employees can’t even get into the fifth floor without an appointment, and that should change.
McMahill: Lombardo has done a great job as sheriff. But one of the things that I’ve spent a very long time on is really investing in our relationship with the community. When you look across the country at cities that are failing, there’s always something in common … and that’s that the police departments have failed as well. Every police department says they’re a community policing organization. And the reality is that you have to build authentic community relationships with people from every walk of life, and Las Vegas is such a diverse community. And we’ve got a good head start on that. But what I want to really do is expand upon that and the basic fundamental of the philosophy that we recognize humanity in one another.
I’m going to significantly increase our response to homeland security. Regardless of which side of the aisle you come from, the reality is that we haven’t really dealt with this threat from abroad as much in the last couple of years. Some people that are here, who’ve become radicalized, can move into action very quickly, particularly after the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
There are three real focus areas that we need to take a real hard look at. How can police leaders impact the sort of unsolvable problems that we see across our community? That’s addiction, mental health and homelessness. The Clark County Detention Center remains the largest mental health facility and largest addiction treatment center in Nevada. We have to put those three core issues, which seem to be unsolvable for all aspects of government, at the forefront.
Candidates agree: 2020 elections were free, fair
Editor’s note: As part of its coverage of the 2022 election, the Sun is asking candidates a uniform set of questions related to the integrity of the 2020 presidential election nationally and in Nevada. We’re posing these questions to all candidates, including those running for nonpartisan offices, because we believe voters deserve to know where potential leaders stand on an issue that is central to the survivability of our democracy.
Is Joe Biden the rightfully elected president of the United States?
Kevin McMahill: I believe so.
Tom Roberts: Yes.
Was the 2020 election in Nevada free and fair?
McMahill: Yes. I know for a fact that there were (irregularities), but I think that goes to every election and I wouldn’t say there was significant fraud by any stretch of the imagination. There are things to tighten, and I hope they do it, but I trust in the election process.
Roberts: Yes.
Do you support the Nevada state Republican Party’s censure of Barbara Cegavske based on how the 2020 election was conducted?
McMahill: I don’t know too much about the state Republican Party. I know she’s a Republican and that some in the party wanted her to do a recount. But I did not know about the censure; surprisingly, I missed that. So I’m not trying to evade your question, but I just don’t know about it.
Roberts: No, I’ve supported Barbara. I think that Barbara has done a good job. She has for the last almost seven years, right, and there was no reason to not believe otherwise. So, yeah, I mean, I, we disagreed with the censure. A lot of us supported her on social media, saying we disagreed with that censure.
What are your thoughts about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol?
McMahill: I think it’s very unfortunate. The halls of Congress, the White House — even locally, the Nevada state Capitol — those are sacred places of democracy. I just don’t believe that that’s the proper way to protest. It’s the same as last summer: I support protesting, but throwing rocks and bottles and batteries at the police is not an acceptable way to protest. Nor was storming the Capitol. I just don’t agree with that.
Roberts: I think it was a horrible incident, and it shouldn’t have occurred. from a policing standpoint, we probably should have been better prepared in the Capitol to really get an idea for what could occur there. But I think it’s horrible that folks took over our Capitol building and did the things they did. I don’t know if (the conduct of many protesters) rises to felonies or misdemeanors, but in the end it’s not conduct that should be condoned.
How would your officers police the Strip?
Roberts: We’re policing it the way we always have, by throwing a bunch of manpower at it and looking for optimum outcomes. I think it’s put a dent in reducing crime, but you need a far-reaching strategy.
We don’t leverage that with UNLV being in our backyard, and its criminal justice academics. We should be using bright minds and partnering with nonprofits, corporations, and using the best technology.
I’ll give you a short example: A company produced an app called “Citizen” that allows users to relate crime in real time. They came to Metro three years ago, pitched this idea that would have cost the department nothing. Metro turned them away for whatever reason. So the technology company cooperated with the New York Police Department, which tailored a police radio feed for the app. Now, the app is in 43 major cities with more than 4 million users. One month, the app developers surmised that 45,000 of its users had visited the Strip. That’s just an example on how we missed an opportunity to collaborate with a private industry to where we could have really made a difference, and I think you need to have that kind of atmosphere.
McMahill: One of the challenges is that a lot of the visitations are undercounted. It used to be that when you talked about 40 million visitors, oftentimes that only referred to McCarran International Airport’s volume, and not visitors who drive here from nearby places like Southern California.
With legal marijuana that can’t be smoked in public, I’m in favor of consumption lounges, because even though marijuana was legalized, that didn’t remove the illegal trade. With the return of large events, collaboration with partner law enforcement agencies will remain key, because I don’t see Metro getting any substantial increases in the number of officers that we need. I don’t know that the appetite exists within the government or even the community to do that.
The upcoming $25 million Reality-Based Training Center will allow law enforcement to train with private resort security officers, firefighters and medics. The more that we train together, the more that we’re able to be familiar with each other. I know the Strip gets a lot of focus, but I have a wife and five kids, and we all live in these neighborhoods, and we want our neighborhoods to be safe, too.
Diversity in Metro
Roberts: We have a number of recruitment councils, and I was involved with them. I think we do a good job of reaching out. But you look at the Metro Explorer youth program for instance: It’s teenagers who can stay until they’re 21, we max it out. The demographics for that program almost mirror the demographics of the city, lagging a little with some in the Black community, but Latinos have a very high interest in it. The problem is that we lose some of those kids who want to become officers. The reason is there’s not a lot of opportunity in Metro to keep them connected. And so they join the military, they go off to school, and they come back to other workforces, and typically get sidetracked by the time they turn 21. We need to bridge the gap and provide more opportunities internally.
We started part-time positions in the Southern Nevada Counterterrorism Center working crime cameras. There’s a number of other things we can do with regular administrative support positions that they could use as rotation jobs, which don’t take a year or more to learn. And when they’re done, they can apply to jump on as police officers.
There are a number of opportunities we could do better at, such as college tuition assistance for the part-time prospects, and provide incentives to keep those people connected. We’re losing a lot of great people by not doing that.
McMahill: Diversity in Metro is always an issue. People talk about what your police department looks like: Does it match the makeup of your community? Metro is very close. But particularly in the Black and Asian communities, if you don’t keep your eye on it, diversity opportunities will very quickly fade away. But even when you look at the breakdown in the Black community, we have a lot more Black officers working in the jail rather than the patrol world. That’s an issue that needs to be addressed.
Our community is rapidly becoming very Hispanic, somewhere around 40%. Clark County School District Superintendent Jesus Jara told me that those enrolled are 51% Hispanic, so it’s a pretty good indication that Hispanics are going to eventually become the majority. Metro is not there yet — we’re not even close to what we need to be on hiring in that community.
Also, nobody ever seems to talk about women in law enforcement. And we’re not even close to 50%. We also need a significant, concentrated effort on not only women in policing, but minority women in policing. I can tell you from being married to Metro Deputy Chief Kelly McMahill that she brought a lot of things not only to our relationship, but the way we looked at the challenges we both faced at Metro. Metro can really benefit from learning how women approach policing. And we have, but we need to do a better job.
We need to reassure prospects that law enforcement is a great career with a great pension, and it’s probably the most exciting, exhilarating job on the planet, and you get to make a difference. In general across the country, recruiting is a challenge for law enforcement. Prior to the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting, we really didn’t have a recruitment problem. People thought about Metro so highly that we just had people coming through the door.
We also need to get into the 2020s in how we look at disqualifications for prospective officers. Marijuana is legal now. Obviously, we can’t have officers smoking marijuana, but is it really a disqualifier that you previously consumed marijuana a number of times? Is it really a qualifier that you did it a year ago versus two, versus three? I don’t know the answer; I’m not an expert on that, but I think we need to take a solid look at some of these requirements.
Lagging COVID-19 vaccination figures in Metro
(Metro has instituted a vaccine mandate only for new hires.)
Roberts: Metro published videos of some department members who’ve contracted COVID. You need to lead by example. You need to talk about it and discuss it. I’ve been vaccinated. Approaching COVID vaccination through a mandate will obviously be hampered by litigation from the police union. To increase vaccination among the ranks, we have to work with the unions to educate officers so they can make their individual choices, but make it the right choice. I believe that if you properly educate folks, you give them examples where the vaccine has saved lives or not being vaccinated has cost lives, people will make the right choice.
McMahill: So this is a topic that is very interesting to me, because a lot of police officers don’t want the COVID vaccine. One of the challenges is, do you have the capability as a sheriff to mandate? There are fringe opinions on the vaccine like the gun control issue — it seems there’s no middle ground.
God willing, when I become the sheriff in January 2023, we won’t be talking about vaccines, we won’t be talking about COVID. That’s what I hope. But let’s be honest, if we are still talking about this, it’s because of emerging COVID variants. But I think the vaccine issue will become less and less of an issue.
I’ll use myself as an example: My whole household contracted the virus in January. We all had all the common COVID symptoms. My wife and I are now vaccinated. But I talked to various doctors the months after. Some told me my immune system was perfectly fine to deal with the virus, you don’t need the vaccine. Meanwhile, the virus killed Metro Lt. Eric Lloyd, an academy mate of mine. And then Officer Jason Swanger dies, and Sgt. Douglas King dies.
My wife is in charge of the COVID response at Metro. There have been 1,500 Metro officers infected and several hospitalizations, some severe, from the virus among Metro’s ranks. One thing common with most is that they were unvaccinated. I’m not anti-vaccine: I believe that the COVID jab can save your life. I made my own personal choice to get vaccinated because I have five children, a wife and two grandchildren, and the vaccine can keep me alive if I were to contract the virus again. I want to stay alive.
The men and women of Metro are very smart people. The divided world we live in has caused people to believe conspiracies; it comes from both fringes. But if we continue to educate them, more officers will ultimately get vaccinated. But I don’t know that we can legally impose a mandate. In my career, I’ve learned to appeal to the heart instead of the head.
Is Metro doing enough to weed out extremist views among its ranks?
Roberts: I know Metro has a very strict social media policy, so that might drive some of the extremist ideology into the underground. Probes to root out the issue are important. And if you find those people, you need to weed them out. They shouldn’t be in the police department if they hold such views. Metro has a robust internal affairs and a criminal administrative system to do that.
McMahill: It’s one of the parts of my platform I’m talking about. Metro does a great job of weeding out those extremist views. But in a 6,000-person agency, some of the people who get through hold bias — I think we all have bias in some way, shape or form. But when their views are radical, there are many mechanisms within Metro to report them. I don’t think that it’s an overt activity within Metro at all. But you have to get good at weeding out the rest of that.
I’m going to create a “Wellness Bureau” at Metro that’s going to take all of the aspects of recruiting, training, retaining and disciplining officers, and put them under one roof. There’s cumulative trauma when working as a police officer. How many homicides have I been to in my career where I saw a body mangled and just atrocious things? You know what happened after? I went on the next call. After that, including the mass shooting on the Strip, I’m glad I got that little bit of a break from Metro because I realized that after 30 years of that cumulative trauma, I didn’t deal with it as well as I should have. It opened my eyes to the fact that we can do better taking care of our people, whether it’s alcoholism, radicalism, illicit drugs or extramarital affairs, we have to have a better idea on what’s impacting Metro members, and maybe we will have the ability to do something about it much earlier, before it becomes a crisis and you’re talking about it on the front page of your paper.