Ear to the Street
By Damon Hodge
Crime Stories
Are you a numbers person? Who just so happens to have a thing for crime? And, perchance, likes nothing more than lazy weekends nuzzled by the fireplace with a good … book of law enforcement data about crime in your city? I didn’t think so.
For the sake of this column, say you were. You’d be all over the Metropolitan Police Department’s annual report for 2004-05 (available on www.lvmpd.com), which packs into 52 graphically snappy pages all the crime data you can eat.
Living as we do in a city whose cookie-cutter subdivisions and complexes prize density over community and leading lives that are all but formulaic -- get up, go to work (if you’ve got a job), come home, do the family-, boyfriend-or-girlfriend, bachelor-or-bachelorette thing, eat, sleep, then repeat -- many of us have little or no connection to the crime stories that headline our papers and lead off our newscasts.
We often say: bad things happen over there – “there” being economically struggling neighborhoods where, presumably, morals and morale are both low -- not over here – “here” being my nice patch of the American Dream where we all just get along.
I’ve got news for you folks: there is here, here is there and crime is here, there and everywhere.
Metro’s stats prove it. Each of Metro’s seven area commands fielded more than 40,000 calls for service (Downtown Area Command, 40,995 calls; Southeast Area Command 67,131; South Central Area Command, 64,935; Southwest Area Command, 70,678; Northwest Area Command, 61,324; Northeast Area Command, 71,012; and Bolden Area Command, 57,462). Metro recently arrested Derrick L. McKnight, who’s suspected of fatally shooting Kenneth A. Hardwick in the drive-through of a Jack in the Box restaurant on Eastern Avenue and Horizon Ridge Parkway. The sad moral of that story: Anthem can be just like Compton.
Want more numbers (it’s a rhetorical question)?
The good folks in the Investigative Services Division were busy as beavers with 8,712 missing persons cases, 3,515 robberies, 20,867 domestic violence cases and 1,735 fugitive arrests. Didn’t think our fair city was that bad, huh?
I’ve not yet begun to enumerate.
Here goes: In 2004-05, there were 69,506 property crimes, 60,981 incarcerations at the Clark County Detention Center, 11,816 crime scenes processed, 9,463 violent crimes, a combined 5,060 vice-related felony and misdemeanor arrests on juvenile and adult prostitution charges, 659 forcible rapes, 338 SWAT-led search warrants, 135 murders, and 687 drive-by shootings investigated. Just last month, www.humantrafficking.org reported that Las Vegas is one of 17 cities identified by the Justice Department as preferred destinations for human trafficking.
Oh, what’s this -- Metro PIO Brooke Mageras is e-mailing as I write: “LVMPD is currently investigating a critical injury traffic accident in the area of El Camino and Sahara. Traffic westbound on Sahara is blocked and we are asking the media to advise the public that they should consider an alternate route of travel for that area until approximately 2 p.m.”
Thanks Brooke, I almost forgot the traffic stats: 239,382 traffic citations, 34,109 accidents investigated, 12,611 injuries, 2,167 arrests on DUI charges and 169 traffic fatalities.
A few more tidbits and I’ll be through, I promise. Metro fielded a whopping 3,667,648 total calls in 2004-05, of which 992,269 were of the 9-1-1 emergency variety and 3,376 people, enough to populate a high school campus, registered as convicted felons. I don’t know about you, but all these numbers, in addition to making me dizzy, are depressing me. For each number represents a life, valuable and remarkable on its own. And in each there are stories -- sad ones and happy ones; stories of lives ruined and lives redeemed, of tragedy and triumph, of pain and promise; stories that weave a narrative of Las Vegas that will never be featured in a "What Happens Here, Stays Here" commercial.
Damon Hodge joined Las Vegas Weekly, in 2001. His specialties include hard-news stories, music reviews, pop culture commentary and occasional forays into social advocacy journalism. Hodge has won numerous awards from the Nevada Press Association.