Saturday, April 6, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
It's 3 p.m., and the sun won't set for another three hours.
That's when crime begins to light up Las Vegas.
To prepare for the night, swing shift patrol officers in the Metro Police downtown substation attend a daily briefing with Lt. Jim Moses.
"Let's go to work," Moses tells about 45 officers gathered in the briefing room after updating them on what happened during the day shift.
Most days, the swing shift is much busier than the day shift, with police rushing from one call to another through the night.
"We just opened a new substation but we don't really have more officers," Sgt. Harold Davis says as he pulls his patrol car out of the new area command's lot at 401 Fifth St. "We didn't increase the department. Officers were transferred and moved around to open the substation."
As police drive through the low-income housing projects downtown, "we'll hear whistles, which mean police are in the area," Davis says. "When the sun goes down, there are a lot more people on the street, a lot more foot traffic."
Like everything else in the Las Vegas Valley, crime is growing. And so is the need for more cops. For violent crimes, dispatchers hold the calls until two officers can go together and back up each other.
Depending on the time of day and the number of calls for service, citizens can wait a few minutes to two hours or more for an officer to arrive, said dispatch Capt. Barbara Connett.
"Let's take the traditional call that would hold, a burglary call," she said. "If it comes in right now and we're not busy, it could be 10 minutes. If it's busy, it could be two hours. For a crime scene analyst, they could wait for five hours. They're so backlogged it's unreal. It's certainly possible to wait for four hours in the middle of swing shift when we're going crazy."
Connett said there was a time, maybe 10 years ago, when 10 minutes was the maximum response time. "Now that's an excellent response," she said.
Connett said calls for service, required for crimes in all categories, are "shooting up sky high and we don't have more people out there."
And if the public gets frustrated, they take it out on the officers, she said. Then the officers start getting frustrated.
"There comes this poor officer who has just listened to the last five people screaming at him," she said. "They're working as hard and as fast as they can, only to be asked, 'Where were you, sitting at Winchell's doughnut shop?'"
The ever-increasing traffic in the valley is causing "a major problem during swing shift" for calls to service, Connett said.
Officers have to sit and wait in heavy traffic "just like everyone else."
"We wait," he says as he's stuck in rush-hour traffic at Commerce Street and Charleston Boulevard. "It's frustrating when we have to get to a call and we wait like this."
Meantime, the calls stack up. When Davis gets into his patrol car each evening, the calls are already stacking up on his in-dash computer.
"There's usually a minimum of five calls for service waiting," he says.
At this time of day, officers are changing shifts, so not every officer is available to go out on calls.
Davis heads to his first call for the day. A security guard at a strip mall on Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue calls police about two men fighting at a bus stop. One is hurt.
Davis and a patrol officer respond and find a man, identified only as 38-year-old "Juan," bleeding from a cut on his cheek. Juan breaks down in tears as the officers ask him questions.
Another man tells the officers that Juan was drinking and got belligerent before he fell to the sidewalk and cut his face. Paramedics take him to the hospital for stitches.
As Davis drives through an industrial area near Commerce Street and Wyoming Avenue, he says: "It gets real quiet here at night. Everybody's closed, so if we see somebody driving or walking around, they're usually up to no good, looking for something to steal."
Next, Davis drives to a call from a nurse at Casino Center Drive and First Street who thinks she found part of a human knee and leg.
Detectives and a Metro photographer are already at the house when Davis drives up. They photograph and inspect the bone, sitting between two 1950s-era bungalows, and decide to call the coroner.
Medical examiners inspect it and decide to take it back to their office in a brown paper bag. About 30 minutes later, a detective gets a call on his cellular phone from the coroner's office.
"It's not human," he says after he hangs up. "It's animal."
The next call is a report that three school-age boys have been found with a stolen pickup truck taken about half an hour earlier from Poplar Avenue and 28th Street.
"There are hundreds of outstanding stolen cars every day," Davis says as he races to the call. "We're seeing a lot more on the street now than we have in the past."
Sgt. Dave Braden, who also responds to the call, says he is booking the boys, ages 9, 10 and 13, into juvenile hall on auto theft charges.
"Maybe they'll think twice about doing this again," Officer John McGrath says as the boys are loaded into patrol cars.
The increase in crime, especially violent crime, costs taxpayers. And the bill could get bigger if voters approve Clark County Sheriff Jerry Keller's bond issue for 450 new cops on the Nov. 5 ballot.
The new cops would be covered by a property tax increase. If approved, it will cost property owners about 20 cents more per $100 of assessed valuation, or a $70 increase in the annual property tax for a $100,000 home.
That 20 cents is the cap that state legislators placed on Metro. The tax would give Keller $28 million to hire 450 new cops and provide radios, equipment and patrol cars.
"I want the public to make the decision, not me," Keller said. "With this unprecedented, uncharted growth, I want to tell the people what we need and let the community make the decision. I think that's the way policing needs to be done."
What Metro actually needs, he said, is 750 new officers by the year 2005 to reach a ratio of two cops for every 1,000 residents, which doesn't include tourists. Metro's ratio is now 1.6 per 1,000.
To come up with the 750 figure, Keller went to each sergeant, lieutenant and captain and asked how many officers they needed. The figure is included in a 10-year safety plan the department is drafting.
"It's not that we need 450 officers -- that would certainly be the absolute minimum we need," Keller said. "We have not yet determined how many we need. It's in the embryonic stage."
Every month, as an estimated 5,000 people move to the valley, Keller said officers lose strength as they are spread thin.
His "community safety plan" is for "the next several years, not just for tomorrow."
"We can never afford to be less safe," he said.
Las Vegas was ranked 63rd on the FBI's worst crime cities list for 1994, with a 39 percent increase in violent crime -- murder, rape, assault and robbery -- in Metro's jurisdiction. As of Friday, there have been 52 homicides so far this year, more than a third of last year's total.
It's not the first time Metro has asked voters to approve more cops. In 1993, a bond question was handily rejected. In 1988, voters approved hiring 200 new officers with a 10-cent property tax increase, which is still in place.
If voters approve the 450 police, the department still would need 50 new officers a year for the next four years to reach a 2-per-1,000 ratio, Keller said.
"That's what it takes to do what we're being asked to do by the public," he said.
Today, Metro has 1,360 officers. With next year's budget, beginning in July, the department will have 100 more cops and 58 new civilian workers.
"If we want to maintain a safe community, we need to have a sufficient number of officers who can do that," Keller said.
Davis said he and his fellow patrol officers see the need every day.
"What we want our officers to do is take care of the problems in the area," he said. "While an officer is trying to catch a robber or some type of suspect, the person who has reported a burglary has to wait. It's frustrating for that citizen who has to wait."
"God willing," the taxpayers will "agree with the sheriff" and approve the ballot measure, dispatch Capt. Connett said. "You simply can no longer maintain this level."
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