A activist holds a sign during a protest against police violence in front of Clark County School District headquarters on West Sahara Avenue Friday, Feb. 17, 2023. A CCSD police officer was caught on cellphone video slamming a Black teen to the ground and kneeling on his back outside Durango High School last Friday.
Tuesday, July 11, 2023 | 5:35 p.m.
A judge has ordered the Clark County School District and the ACLU of Nevada to work together to refine one of the contentious requests in their public records battle tied to the violent interaction that school police had with Black students this spring outside of Durango High School.
Clark County District Judge Danielle “Pieper” Chio, at the conclusion of a two-hour hearing Tuesday, did not directly order CCSD to give the ACLU the officers’ body-worn camera footage, incident report and other records connected to the Feb. 9 incident, during which a CCSD Police officer tackled a Black teen and knelt on his back. Those are records that the ACLU, which is providing legal representation to two of the involved students, sued to get after CCSD denied the civil rights organization’s requests — many of which local media, including the Sun, have also made.
Chio did, however, tell the district to give her the body camera footage, police report, dispatch notes and the citation written to the tackled teen, which she hadn’t yet seen, before she could render a decision on CCSD’s argument that the records are confidential and cannot be released, even to the teens’ lawyers.
Chio said CCSD and the ACLU have 30 days to refine the search of police, top administration and School Board email inboxes to see how district leaders responded to the incident. If the two sides are still at an impasse after a month, the court will conduct a hearing with an information technology professional to determine how to best search the email archives. CCSD has previously said it would be a crushing burden to fully undertake the search for the requested emails.
Chio also directed the district to produce the internal investigation records the ACLU sought on the key officer.
The fight will now take until at least late August to be resolved.
The ACLU sued CCSD in April for the records, weeks after its initial request and the district’s denial.
A viral cellphone video clip of the incident, which is just under a minute long, shows a uniformed CCSD Police officer walking in the street to a police vehicle, detaining a teenage boy with his hands behind his back. As the officer leaned the teen against the hood, another teen 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 the incident in question are Black.
CCSD said in filings and again Tuesday that the camera footage and all written records, including the incident report, are confidential because they involve minors in the juvenile justice system. The ACLU said the one boy was cited, not arrested, for a misdemeanor and not under the jurisdiction of the local juvenile court system.
CCSD lawyer Jackie Nichols said Tuesday that the boy was cited for obstruction of a criminal investigation. None of the other teens seen in the video were arrested or cited.
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 email records, which it estimated based on a preliminary search covered as many as 40,000 pages. That would require about eight months of work to the exclusion of any other assignments, 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.
Superintendent Jesus Jara has recently told other media that the key officer in the incident remained employed with CCSD Police, that the investigation into the incident was closed, and that the district does not plan to change its use-of-force policy.
Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Athar Haseebullah, ACLU of Nevada’s executive director, said it wasn’t just that the ACLU could sue for public records.
“We can do this all day. We have the resources to do this all day. The general public doesn’t have the resources to be able to do that,” he said. “The issue becomes if you stonewall every other person or every other entity or actor that comes in with a records request and say you don’t have something that’s responsive, or it’s too much and you can’t keep up with it, it’s simply not sufficient.”
CCSD and the ACLU’s next court hearings on the matter are set for Aug. 8 and Aug. 31.
