Athar Haseebullah, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, speaks during a news conference at the ACLU of Nevada offices Friday, Jan. 19, 2024. The news conference addressed questions relating to the release of CCSD Police body-worn camera footage depicting a CCSD police officer tackling and kneeling on a Black teen outside a Las Vegas high school last year.
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 | 2 a.m.
The Clark County School District Police Department’s internal investigative file into events surrounding a call during which an officer tackled and knelt on a Black teenager’s back will remain confidential, a Clark County District Court judge ruled Tuesday.
The ACLU of Nevada had already been unsuccessful in getting the final investigative report into Lt. Jason Elfberg’s actions in the February 2023 incident outside Durango High School but had hoped to get other components like transcripts of witness interviews.
However, Clark County District Judge Danielle Pieper concluded that the full file should remain protected to stay consistent with her prior decision to keep the final report confidential. The earlier decision was because Elfberg did not receive any punitive discipline from CCSD or CCSDPD for the incident. Under state law, he has not seen the report himself.
Pieper said she struggled with the decision, as the state public records law, which the ACLU is leaning on to get a raft of records from the after-school incident, encourages the public’s right to know.
The ACLU, which is representing two of the students involved, sued CCSD in April 2023 for CCSD Police body-worn camera video and other records that it said the School District was resistant to releasing, claiming that withholding the records violated the Nevada Public Records Act.
Now that the public has seen the two hours of body-worn camera footage from Elfberg and other officers who responded to the call that day — key records that the district released in January after a nearly yearlong fight — the need to keep additional records confidential is diminished, ACLU attorney Jacob Smith said Tuesday.
Police had said the incident stemmed from a weapons and fight investigation. Elfberg detained three students out of a group of predominantly Black teens, including the one he slammed into a gutter and knelt on as bystanders called for him to take his weight off the teen’s back. A misdemeanor citation against that child, for resisting Elfberg, was dropped.
The bodycam footage showed the teens consistently complying with officer orders to stay back and trying to defuse the situation, contradicting police accounts that they were aggressive. No weapons were found or student fights depicted in the videos.
ACLU of Nevada Executive Director Athar Haseebullah said after Tuesday’s hearing that the ACLU was especially interested in reviewing witness statements and voicemails left with the department in response to the incident, which went viral almost immediately based on bystander cellphone video.
“We would have loved to see the actual interviews and understand the interview process. If there were more interviews conducted than simply with respect to Lt. Elfberg within the file — we don’t know that for a fact,” he said. “What we do know is that our clients were never contacted to conduct an interview. Our clients’ families were never contacted to conduct an interview with respect to this investigation. So we know on our end, we were never contacted with respect to providing anything on behalf of our clients with respect to the internal investigation.”
A general list of relevant records that CCSD acknowledges exists but deems confidential included audio, video, transcripts and scripts for four witness interviews, although it’s not clear who the interview subjects are other than Elfberg.
Haseebullah added that even redacted records would prove insightful in outlining the scope of the internal investigation.
“We don’t have the full contents, or full information with what’s within that file, the length and volume of it, which is why we kept referencing the fact that the length of this matters,” he said. “If it’s 300 pages of documents in there, and we see 50 voicemails that are transcribed or something else of the sort, there’s something to be said about that to the public that, hey, this was a real investigation that was done. If they come back (with) a six-page investigative report, I think there’s something to be said about that as well.”
Additionally, the district plans within 45 days to release about 3,000 pages of emails that mention the case. The district has previously said that the search and production of the messages was unduly burdensome, initially saying that, based on certain keywords, a search yielded potentially 40,000 pages of possibly relevant messages.
Pieper also directed the district to pay the ACLU $36,159.50 in attorneys’ fees and costs.
The organization had requested $48,730.50, reflecting its efforts between February 2023 and early January 2024 to get the records.
Pieper reduced the amount by about $12,600 to exclude the fees and costs associated with the internal investigation report, which the ACLU failed in obtaining.
The district argued it shouldn’t have to pay because the ACLU was not entitled to recover its own fees since it was a party litigant. It also said the ACLU did not “prevail” because it received the records in “nothing more than a technical production” after the boys’ parents gave written consent to release the files.
Pieper, who ordered the records’ release in December, said Tuesday that the ACLU was indeed the prevailing party.
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