Officials defend handling of gun crimes

Present and former court and police officials have stepped forward to defend Nevada's record of prosecuting federal gun crimes, in the wake of a national study that suggested it had one of the poorest records in the country.

On the contrary, said all three, the federal district of Nevada has done a better job than most at imprisoning armed criminals.

The study by the watchdog organization Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) credited Nevada-based agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) with generating some of the highest rates of gun-related arrests among all 90 federal districts, but said the U.S. attorney for Nevada for several years has prosecuted a smaller percentage than most federal districts: only 12 percent last year.

Most of the cases are generated by Project Safe Neighborhoods, a program in which local and federal officials decide cooperatively whether to prosecute gun cases, typically against felons with multiple previous convictions, under state or federal law. Current and former members of those agencies, who have participated in the local Project Safe Neighborhoods program, say the unflattering prosecution numbers in the TRAC report result from misleading "apples to oranges" comparisons of cases labeled differently here than in other jurisdictions.

Frank Coumou, Clark County's chief deputy district attorney in charge of the gun crimes unit, said, "The way I see it, the feds are doing us a favor taking the worst of the worst. It would be frustrating to take these guys to our state court where they might get anywhere from probation to six years, when the federal guidelines would go up to life for an active career criminal.

"I am not at all dismayed by the number of declines by the U.S. attorney's office here. The numbers tell me that a lot more cases were reviewed in this jurisdiction than in others."

He gave a specific example.

"There's a guy who has been a troublemaker in northeast (Las Vegas) for years," Coumou said. "Even the crooks are afraid of him. He gets arrested with a sawed-off shotgun and a handgun ... Taken federal, he's now looking at maybe five years."

Coumou didn't want to name the defendant before the defendant's trial is scheduled.

In another case, earlier this month federal firearm charges were among those brought against Charles Richard Jr., aka "Lil Cheese," accused of a military-style assault at a North Las Vegas apartment complex in 2004, killing one man and wounding a woman.

Two men have already received life sentences for their parts in the raid; Richard faces up to 160 years in prison on the gun charges alone, said Natalie Collins, a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney.

Nevada founded its own version of the program that became Project Safe Neighborhoods even before it became a national program with the blessing of President Bush, said Kurt Schulke, now retired but formerly chief of the criminal division in the U.S. attorney's office here.

"We patterned it on the Project Exile program started in Richmond, Va., by Jim Comey, who later became deputy attorney general of the United States," Schulke said.

Representatives of the U.S. attorney met with Las Vegas police and with Stewart Bell, who was then Clark County district attorney. Each of these agencies formed a "gun unit" with personnel devoted specifically to combatting gun crimes. Other law-enforcement agencies later joined the program.

"When any felon was picked up with a gun the complaints went to the district attorney. ATF would get copies and run the individuals involved to see what their background was."

Doing that on the ATF computer system, Schulke said, required opening a federal case.

"But the idea from the get-go was that many of those cases would go to the state for prosecution," Schulke said.

"We took those who warranted federal prosecution, and they took those that were best as state cases, and it worked perfectly," he added.

But the federal label on every case persisted in Justice Department statistics, explained Daniel Bogden, the former U.S. attorney for Nevada, who held the office during most of the five years covered by TRAC's study, 2003-2007.

Statistically, that made any of those cases which were not actually prosecuted federally look like they were refused for prosecution, when nearly all were in fact prosecuted by state authorities, he said.

Coumou confirmed that nearly all were ultimately prosecuted.

He added that Project Safe Neighborhoods programs in other districts use many different methods of screening cases, which happen to make their federal prosecution percentages look higher on paper, but that Nevada prosecutes more gun cases for its population, one way or another, than most jurisdictions.

The state also had more convictions in relation to its population: The TRAC study ranked Nevada 28th out of 90 federal districts in that respect last year, and 15th in 2004.

Bogden said his personal records indicated that more than 500 cases were brought to the Project Safe Neighborhoods program in some of the years he was U.S. attorney.

In 2003, for instance, the task force screened 557. By the end of the year 166 of those had been accepted for federal prosecution and 255 for state prosecution. The rest were still pending.

As a result of the program, Bogden wrote in an e-mail to the Review-Journal, "The number of firearm cases being prosecuted in Southern Nevada rose dramatically. More gun-toting felons were being taken off our streets ... whether that be by being sent to federal prison or to state prison."

Lt. Roy Phillips, who heads the firearms section for the Metropolitan Police Department, agreed that Project Safe Neighborhoods became a serious occupational hazard to habitual criminals.

In 2003, Phillips said, his section referred 380 cases to the district attorney, which in turn referred 149 of them, or 39 percent, for federal prosecution through the Project Safe Neighborhoods program.

Phillips had no statistics for cases retained in the state courts, but said most of those also resulted in prosecutions and convictions.

The percentage referred from that unit, then prosecuted federally, gradually declined to 16 percent last year, but Schulke said all Project Safe Neighborhoods players expected significant reduction as prison sentences removed the worst local offenders and made packing heat less fashionable for "prohibited persons" -- felons and others banned by law from possessing firearms.

"Especially when the program first started, the word on the street was 'Do not get caught with a gun if you're a prohibited person,'" Phillips said.

Contact A.D. Hopkins at ahopkins @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0270.