LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – How often do you see a Nevada state trooper during your daily commute? Odds are — not very often, because the highway patrol faces a critical staffing shortage.
In fact, just 50 troopers monitor the entire Las Vegas Valley, and the more than two million people who live here. It’s a public safety issue that some believe only political action can solve.
“It’s bad. I mean, like anybody that drives in the Las Vegas Metropolitan area knows that traffic is just, it’s crazy. Speeds are unbelievable. Crashes are happening at an alarming rate.”
Driving in the Valley frightens Dan Gordon, and he’s a Nevada state trooper.
“Traffic moves at an incredible pace, and I think a lot of it has to do with the public not really seeing any troopers out there on the road doing any kind of proactive enforcement. We just simply don’t have the numbers to do that.”
Gordon is also the president of the Nevada Police Union. The lack of troopers on the state’s highways scares him almost as much as drivers’ speeds.
“We’ve got many duty stations between Las Vegas and the Reno area, and then between Reno and the Elko area, and beyond that don’t have any troopers assigned to them at all. We’re just shorthanded in a lot of different places,” he says. “You’re going through some of these smaller towns in rural Nevada, and there’s no troopers around, it’s kind of like you have a better chance of seeing Sasquatch riding a unicorn, that’s just how it is.”
It’s not a new problem for the Nevada State Police. Gordon tells us it’s been understaffed for decades, but the problem has worsened in recent years. The budget calls for 392 full-time troopers. The NSP currently has 218. That means the Department of Public Safety needs to hire 191 more to fill its 45 percent vacancy rate.
Unfortunately, ramped-up recruitment efforts don’t seem to be working.
“In spite of the advertising, in spite of the applications, your vacancy rate is pretty alarming.”
That was state Senator Robin Titus’s observation during a February 14th hearing on the Department of Public Safety’s budget.
“Your highway patrol, you actually have a dramatic worsening of your vacancy rate from 28 percent to 33 percent,” said the senator. “But boy, that’s a dramatic worsening.”
So what’s the problem?
“We have to be more attractive to join the Nevada State Police, and right now it’s very, very difficult as far as with the cost of living to be able to be an attraction,” said Gordon.
He tells us other law enforcement agencies simply pay more.
“You can just go across the street and make, 20, 25, 30 percent more.”
FOX5 Investigates compared salaries through agency websites and via sites like Glassdoor.com and Zip Recruiter. We learned the average trooper makes around $71,000 a year. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers make a bit more, at slightly less than $78,000, and Henderson officers average around $63,000.
Despite collective bargaining, Gordon can’t secure his members bigger raises without the bosses in Carson City signing off on it.
“It’s very much we get caught in the middle, because sometimes it becomes very political. I just, I always wish that this wasn’t so much a politics issue, or a game, it was a public safety issue.”
FOX5 did reach out to the Department of Public Safety for their perspective, but they declined our request for an interview.
We do know Deputy DPS director Sheri Brueggemann told state lawmakers in February that hiring remains both a priority and a problem for the agency.
The legislature did give the Highway Patrol a 23 percent raise in 2023 to help make its salaries competitive, but Gordon tells us the pay gap is widening once again, and he knows another big increase is unlikely this session.
“I know that everybody wants the same thing and we’ve got to figure out how to bridge that gap so that we can achieve what the state of Nevada deserves, the citizens and the visitors to this great state.”
State lawmakers are still drafting the final budget for the next two years, so it’s still unclear if troopers will see another big boost in salaries before 2027.
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