The ACLU of Nevada is not buying the Clark County School District’s argument that it could be extremely burdensome to review records related to a violent district police interaction with a Black student.
Nor does the civil rights organization accept the confidentiality reasons the school district gave to deny the majority of the ACLU’s request for records related to the Feb. 9 after-school incident outside Durango High School, during which a CCSDPD officer tackled a Black teen and knelt on his back.
The refusal led the ACLU, which is legally representing two of the students involved in the incident, to sue for the police reports, body-worn camera footage, emails and other records.
“Since the ACLU first submitted its records request on Feb. 21, 2023, the Clark County School District has made every effort to avoid disclosing any records related to the Feb. 9 incident in violation of the (Nevada Public Records Act),” the ACLU wrote in a Friday filing in the case, the most recent filing and the last scheduled before a hearing on the matter later this month.
“The district engaged in this stonewalling even as its employees repeatedly talked to the media (to) justify the district’s actions,” the filing added — a reference to statements CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara gave to other media last week that the key officer in the incident remained employed with CCSDPD, that the investigation into the incident was closed, and that the district does not plan to change its use-of-force policy.
CCSD said in a June 9 filing in Clark County district court that the ACLU’s request for “communications” to CCSD staff and School Board members about the incident is “significantly broad and overly burdensome” because, after a preliminary search based on how the ACLU worded its request, CCSD could have as many as 40,000 pages of emails.
In its rebuttal to the ACLU’s suit, which was filed in April, CCSD said the camera footage and all written records, including the incident report, are confidential because they involve minors in the juvenile justice system.
CCSD also argued that with a single employee processing public records requests, the district does not have the resources to sort and redact all the potential records, which it estimated would be done at a rate of 250 pages per day. That would require nearly 160 business days — about eight months — to the exclusion of any other work, they argued.
But “burden,” for a hypothetical set of records that the district estimated based on a preliminary search, is not a legal justification to deny records, the ACLU said.
“If the Legislature had intended to grant government entities the power (to) deny requests outright that the entity considered ‘burdensome’ the Legislature would have done so,” it wrote.
The ACLU also argued that only one student in the video — the boy who was tackled, referred to in filings as the ACLU’s client M.W. — was cited, for an alleged misdemeanor that the filing does not detail. Being cited for a misdemeanor does not put him under the jurisdiction of juvenile court, the ACLU said. Further, it added, the Clark County District Attorney’s Office has not filed any delinquency petitions related to the incident. A delinquency petition is the juvenile equivalent of an adult complaint or indictment.
A viral cellphone video clip of the incident, which is just under a minute long, shows a uniformed CCSDPD officer walking in the street to a police vehicle, detaining a teenage boy with his hands behind his back. As he leaned the teen against the hood, another boy walked through the frame, holding out what appeared to be his phone.
The officer then followed him, and they exchanged words. Within seconds, the officer wrapped his arms around the second teen from behind and took him to the ground, pinning him in the gutter with his knees on the young man’s back.
The officer also shoved another teen who approached and yelled “back the (expletive) up” several times. All of the teens in this incident are Black.
CCSDPD Chief Mike Blackeye has said that an after-school weapons investigation near Durango preceded the Feb. 9 incident and that the teens detained were acting suspiciously. Police have not made it clear if the students that CCSDPD detained that day had anything to do with the weapons report.
The records case is set for a hearing on July 11
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