How to apply for police misconduct review panel

Clark County officials are looking for people who want to serve on a board that reviews misconduct complaints against Las Vegas police.

The Metropolitan Police Department Citizen Review Board members are appointed to three-year terms.

Applicants for the unpaid positions must be residents of Las Vegas or unincorporated Clark County, and have no felony convictions. They are also required to have a flexible weekday schedule and to complete training with police.

Elected officials, current or former Metro officers, and their family members, are not allowed to serve.

Applications are available on the board’s website. The members are appointed by officials who serve on the Metropolitan Police Committee on Fiscal Affairs.

The 25-member review board, which is broken into a rotating five-person panel, probes citizen complaints and forwards the findings to Metro’s internal affairs bureau.

The complaints must be submitted within one year of an alleged incident.

A new panel is randomly chosen every six months and members may serve on one to three panels during their three-year tenure.

Once Metro conducts its investigation, the board reviews the results and can call for hearings, where it may recommend disciplinary action against the officers.

Ultimately, the Clark County sheriff has the last word on discipline.

The review board was established after the 1997 fatal drive-by shooting of Daniel Mendoza by 0ff-duty Metro officers, which caused ” minority communities from the city joined in efforts to establish an independent citizen police review board with subpoena power and the authority to recommend sanctions for officer misconduct,” according to the board’s website.

The board touts itself as an independent oversight agency.

But a 2021 Review-Journal investigation found that the the board almost always dismissed citizen complaints or sided with Metro’s internal affairs’ determinations.

The newspaper examined three years of data and determined that eight out of nearly 900 complaints the board received were referred to hearing panels to examine Metro’s internal affairs’ decisions.

“It would be unfair and unduly simplistic to measure the effectiveness of the Citizen Review Board solely by how often it disagrees with the findings of Metro’s Internal Affairs Bureau,” a county spokesman wrote in an email at the time. “Any fair assessment would require a case-by-case review of written findings, which are a public record. Such a review would yield examples where the CRB has very clearly come to a different conclusion.”

Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @rickytwrites.