Melissa Finnell, left, and Bernard Walker hold signs 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.
Sunday, Jan. 21, 2024 | 2 a.m.
More than two hours of body-worn camera footage from school police officers showed how they approached a group of predominantly Black students last February outside Durango High School in southwest Las Vegas.
Tension flared when an officer detained three teens, and threw one of them to the ground and kneeled on his back repeatedly. The incident went viral on a social media post, which until Thursday was the lone video the public had consumed of the interaction.
The footage from the six officers, released pursuant to a court order to the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, gave a glimpse of what transpired. It also showed the teens being fully compliant with police — consistently. They, in fact, tried to defuse the situation.
And at no point did they act in a threatening manner to the police.
“We’ve probably both watched this about a dozen times at this point,” ACLU of Nevada Executive Director Athar Haseebullah said. “And every time we’ve watched it, we found more issues than the previous time.”
The Sun analyzed the footage. Here’s what we observed:
Students were compliant
They verbally protested and self-advocated but were nonaggressive.
The most revealing footage of this comes from Lt. Jason Elfberg, the officer who detained all three students.
Elfberg made the first detention of a teen walking in the street, after he pulled ahead of him in his patrol vehicle.
“C’mere, man. You wanted my attention, you got it, bud. Come on over here,” he said. Elfberg asked the teen, who was wearing a black hoodie, for identification, which the boy did not have.
“You wanted my attention bud, you got it now,” Elfberg said. “You want to keep looking at me and talking, you got my attention now.”
In his written report, Elfberg explained how another officer, Sgt. Terence Bolden, said this teen was “moving about the crowd pointing at our vehicles, and talking to other juveniles. At one point, Bolden stated he thought he saw something in (his) pocket and that he believed (he) may have a weapon, due to his actions.” (The report later said that the teen was unarmed.)
As Elfberg led the teen in the black hoodie to another patrol vehicle, he told students to his left, out of frame of the bodycam, to keep walking. The teen held out his phone in the same direction that Elfberg was speaking in, asking someone to call his mother. Elfberg took the phone out of his hand and told him to relax. The boy in black then turned to face the vehicle and put his hands up.
“He didn’t do nothing at all!” a voice called from the sidewalk.
At this point, a group of students that was walking on the sidewalk slowed. Elfberg told them to leave. A voice said they didn’t have to. He told them they did, and they were blocking the sidewalk.
Students continued walking in different directions and crossing the street.
Elfberg approached one, whose voice sounded like the one who told him the first boy hadn’t done anything, as he was walking away with his back to the officer.
“Come here,” he said.
“I didn’t do nothing,” the boy, who was wearing a blue hoodie, said, his tone more pitched.
“I will touch your cousin,” Elfberg said to another teen standing at his side. “Let’s go.”
A boy wearing a gray hoodie put his hand lightly on the boy in blue’s arm.
Elfberg took the boy in blue’s arm. He protested.
“What did I do? Call my momma,” he said, handing his phone to a teen wearing plaid pants. “What the (expletive)? I didn’t do anything. What the hell.” His tone was pleading.
“I told you to start walking, now you want to be a part of it. Now you’re a part of it,” Elfberg said as he led the teen, arms behind his back, to the patrol vehicle. The students, about 10 of them, began talking more excitedly.
The teen in gray came back in frame, walking on the sidewalk holding out a phone.
“You want next, dude, you want next? Start walking,” Elfberg said.
“No,” the teen in gray said. He turned around and gestured toward the boys being detained. “You’re refusing to walk,” Elfberg said, although the boy was walking backwards.
“Don’t touch me,” the boy said
“What are you gonna do?” Elfberg said.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.”
Elfberg then spun him against a chain-link fence, took him to the pavement and kneeled on his back.
He pulled out his pepper spray and pointed it at students who approached, but stayed more than arm’s reach, as he was kneeling on the teen in gray and yelling at them to “back the (expletive) up!”
The students attempted to calm the situation.
Students repeatedly told Elfberg to get off the teen. When one got close to Elfberg, another boy stepped between them even though Elfberg was brandishing his pepper spray.
Another boy, in tan pants, approached, remaining on the sidewalk to tell the officer the teen in gray hadn’t done anything. Two other boys pulled him away.
In another video, an officer with the boy in blue said, “They’re making it worse on you, bud. Tell them to leave” “Leave, leave bro! Leave!” The boy shouted.
“That’s the way to do it,” the officer said.
“But I didn’t do nothing,” the boy said.
No mention of a gun or fight
CCSDPD Chief Mike Blackeye has said that a weapons investigation preceded the Durango incident, though the department has not said that a weapon was found that day.
On Feb. 8, CCSDPD received a report that someone brandished a gun at a crowd of students at a fast-food restaurant just off campus after school and threatened a shooting at a Durango basketball game that night, Blackeye said at a town hall last March about the incident.
Though no shooting took place, more officers were on campus the next day, the day of the incident caught on video. At some point during the school day, some students told police that somebody in a car had brandished a weapon outside the school, Blackeye said.
Officers searched a car but did not find a gun.
About an hour later, the incident in the video clips took place.
Elfberg told the first boy that he got his attention, and the second boy that he wanted to be a “part of it.” He pursued the third boy after he saw him recording and telling him to keep walking.
But there was mention of a gun and fight when officers spoke to a student’s father.
The teen in blue’s parents arrived quickly. The mother was distraught. The father asked officers what was going on.
“There was a fight between the kids,” an officer who is not Elfberg said. “There’s been some gun stuff going on prior to this today. Not sure if this group or not.”
“So we broke up a fight and all the kids that were handcuffed came onto us and were touching us pulling us trying to get (us) to fight themselves.”
None of this is shown in videos
“So we said, you guys need to back up. You’re not even part of the fight,” the officer continued. “They refused. They contributed to it. They kept pulling at us, shaking on us.”
Again, none of this is shown in the videos.
Later, the same officer told a colleague on scene that there had been a fight at the nearby fast food restaurant. But there wasn’t a fight.
“The whole crowd went this way, LT grabs one, and the whole crowd just swarms us, dude,” he said.
The videos showed several teenagers on the sidewalk. They did not show swarming movement when Elfberg started detaining students.
“I tell you what, we gave them a thousand warnings, man. A thousand. Every tone, too – kind, patient.”
The Sun’s Emma Brocato contributed to this story.
