Christopher Peterson, left, legal director of the ACLU of Nevada, responds to a question during a news conference at the ACLU of Nevada offices Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, listens at right.
Thursday, March 7, 2024 | 2 a.m.
The ACLU of Nevada is still fighting the Clark County School District for the internal investigative file on the district police officer who threw a student to the ground during a violent encounter last year with a group of predominantly Black teens.
The ACLU has been largely successful in its attempts so far to gather information from CCSD stemming from the Feb. 9, 2023, after-school incident outside Durango High School.
In January, under order from a Clark County District judge, CCSD released more than two hours of body-worn camera footage of Lt. Jason Elfberg tackling and kneeling on the Black student and footage from other officers who responded to the scene, along with the incident report, the citation issued to the student for resisting Elfberg and dispatch notes.
The judge denied the request for Elfberg’s final investigative report. CCSDPD did not punish Elfberg for the incident, but the judge said the ACLU could argue for the release of components that led to the report, such as interview transcripts.
“CCSD now claims that the confidentiality of a single record should extend to 72 other documents,” the ACLU said in a Monday filing responding to CCSD’s continued argument that the full file should remain confidential. “To do so, CCSD attempts to move the goal posts by modifying which records it considers to be within the ‘investigative file’ by only removing the documents ordered by the court as public records.”
The organization, which is representing two of the students involved, sued CCSD in April for the video and other related records after CCSD initially denied their public records request. It said CCSD presented no new arguments in trying to keep the full file from release and “copies and pastes a 'balance of interests' argument from a previous filing.”
A legal concept, the balance of interests is between Elfberg and colleagues’ interest in privacy and confidentiality versus the public’s interest.
“The public has always been interested in how complicit CCSD and the other officers were in Elfberg’s actions, and the records sought here may shed light on CCSD and the other officers’ complicity,” the ACLU said.
The matter is set for a hearing March 19. The hearing will also cover the ACLU’s continued pressure for the release of email communications within the School District on the incident and for CCSD to pay the ACLU’s lawyers’ costs and fees. As of January, the amount was nearly $50,000.
