Leslie Turner, organizer of the Mass Liberation Project, speaks during a panel discussion on police reform in the Mob Museum’s historic courthouse in downtown Las Vegas Tuesday, June 8, 2021.
Wednesday, June 9, 2021 | 2 a.m.
After giving birth to a premature baby boy, Leslie Turner was working to get her life back in order.
She had a new job and knew she had to set aside money from her first paycheck to quash a warrant triggered by unpaid administrative traffic violations.
But before she got it resolved, Metro Police pulled her over.
That day in 2015, she was in handcuffs, being hauled off to jail, leaving her 4-month-old at home and in need of breastfeeding, she said.
She spent nearly a week behind bars before she was able to bail out. The jail time left her traumatized, she said.
Nevada Assembly Bill 116, signed into law Tuesday by Gov. Steve Sisolak, would ensure no one else in Turner’s situation would go to jail for minor traffic infractions, which will now be civil in nature as opposed to criminal misdemeanors.
The legislation had been introduced four other times over the last 10 years. For Turner, it’s a decade too long, especially for those who land in a “vicious cycle” in the criminal justice system for the mere fact of not being able to afford to pay.
She called the law the “bare minimum” that could’ve been done in criminal justice system reform during the latest legislative session, which was discussed Tuesday at the Mob Museum in downtown during a panel discussion on police reform.
Turner, an organizer with the Mass Liberation Project, was joined by Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, state Sen. Dallas Harris, D-Las Vegas, and Rick McCann, chief legislative lobbyist with the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers.
The conversation is like those that happened before and during the session and which need to continue, the panel agreed.
Police reform was brought to the forefront of the national conversation with the 2020 deaths of George Floyd, who died pinned under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, and Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by Louisville, Ky., police during a no-knock warrant, and the nationwide protests that followed.
Taylor’s death inspired Ford’s office to introduce Nevada Senate Bill 50, which would put stringent limits on how no-knock warrants are issued and calls for accountability for police who sidestep the guidelines.
Asked prior to the event how Floyd and Taylor guided police reform in the Legislature, Ford said they were “absolutely crucial.”
“We know that they weren’t the first in the litany of killings, specifically of African American men and women,” Ford said. “We know that, unfortunately, they won’t be the last.”
Another piece of legislation supported by Ford, which also passed, was Assembly Bill 58, which will require Nevada police agencies to inform his office within three days of when officers seriously hurt or kill someone.
The bill, signed into law by Sisolak on the anniversary of Floyd’s death, gives the attorney general’s office subpoena powers, allowing it to file civil actions “to eliminate certain patterns or practices that deprive persons of certain rights, privileges or immunities.”
“What we’re trying to do is to ensure that we are improving the relationship between law enforcement and the communities that we serve,” Ford said. “And the way that we can do that is to ensure that we have accountability and transparency.”
Proposed criminal justice reform bills that died this legislative session include a ban on the death penalty, which opponents claim disproportionately affects Black people, and a Harris bill that would reform qualified immunity for police, which protects officers from most civil lawsuits.
Harris said she’s learned that “in Nevada politics, nothing happens quickly,” and vowed to continue working to push forward some of the same proposals that didn’t survive.
McCann said he knows “qualified immunity will be back” during the next session. He maintained throughout the event that if legislation doesn’t place officers at a disadvantage, reform is healthy for society.
“Don’t make a cop a criminal overnight for being a good cop,” he said. “Let’s do it right.”
It’s likely that lawmakers, advocates and stakeholders, including police, will never agree on certain issues, such as what it would mean to “defund” or “abolish” police — which according to Turner means diverting police funding to community resources better equipped to deal with certain scenarios that officers respond to now, and eventually living in a society where policing is not needed, possibly decades from now.
“We don’t do that by putting more money into the police, we do that by putting more money into the community,” she said.
Ford said that he was part of a similar conversation a year ago at the Mob Museum about “what we needed to get done, what we wanted to do … I’m happy that a year later, we’re here now not about what we’re going to do, but what we did actually do.”
