Just a few weeks ago, I stood in front of 300 students at Canyon Springs High School in North Las Vegas and talked about civic engagement, shared values, and what it means to be an American. A few days after Alumni Day, someone brought an AR-style rifle onto their field.
It all began when a school administrator spotted several people in the parking lot who seemingly did not belong. They called the Clark County School District police, where officers promptly responded. The group immediately fled while law enforcement pursued them into a neighborhood west of the school. Two people were arrested for the disturbance, and police recovered two firearms, including a rifle left on the field.
I want to be frank, not merely as a policy advocate, but as a graduate of Clark County public schools. I am a product of the Law and Leadership Academy at Canyon Springs. I couldn’t imagine the same hallways I walked bearing the heavy weight of another tragedy. What happened only occurred the way it did because officers were there. In a district already cutting security staff to balance its budget, we cannot take that for granted.
This is also the school where a student was shot and killed on the same campus in 2018. Eight years later, the proximity of violence to these kids hasn’t moved.
Canyon Springs sits in North Las Vegas, where violent crime runs nearly 500% above the city’s average. Governor Joe Lombardo knows this. Before he was sheriff, Lombardo attended Rancho High School. When he introduced his Safer Streets and Neighborhoods Act, he was legislating from experience, not distance. Passed with bipartisan support, the bill preserved campus police officers’ authority to protect students on school grounds. On Tuesday, they were there.
The officers who ran toward that parking lot on Tuesday gave those kids another day. They kept the kids safe for now, but we cannot abandon them. And yet, many cities in the Silver State are doing just that – cutting police budgets and leaving the most vulnerable without help.
For example, earlier this year, the City of Reno cut several police positions and raised fees in order to balance a 24 million deficit. Being a good stewardess of tax payer money is important. Having a balanced budget is part of that responsibility. But the cuts should never be from such a fundamental service like law enforcement.
The city of Sparks last year already underwent the problems that rise when you cut police budgets. “I think most people would be upset to find out that at any given time, there could be only four police officers for the entire city of Sparks working the road,” one officer noted. For a city over over 100,000 residents, 4 officers on the road seems hardly enough. And yet, this is the reality of cutting police budgets.
If we want to keep our children safe, as well as our residents and livelihood, the worst cuts a city can make is to its police budget. This is not to say spending copious amounts of money on police departments is the solution. Any public safety spending must come with strings to ensure that they are being used in a reasonable and prudent manner. But at the end of the day, police departments across the state, and the country, need more resources to ensure officers can respond promptly like they did in Canyon Springs High School.
