LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Metro Sheriff Kevin McMahill has led the Las Vegas Metro Police Department for more than two years now.
Sheriff McMahill is the top cop of the nation’s seventh largest police force. He spoke one-on-one with FOX5’s Kim Passoth to discuss his top priorities and his mission to make the community safer.
“First and foremost, we want to talk about the ICE agreement… What do you want the public to know about that?,” Passoth asked.
“Let me just be clear of what our policy is. Our policy is entirely jail based. It’s detention based, so when you walk in the door to our jail and you’re arrested for a certain offense and you’re foreign born, we make a notification to ICE,” McMahill explained.
“I started to see that we’re still having to let some very serious criminals out of our jail, that ICE wasn’t picking up. Quite frankly, I didn’t want them in our community. These are rapists, pedophiles, people that have beaten their spouse four or five times, DUI’s that had been arrested four or five times and so what I did was I entered into this agreement with ICE that allows us to receive as this individual’s leaving. If they’re not available, they can send us the warrant and we can rebook on that warrant for ICE and hold them for up to 48 hours so that ICE can come and get those guys,” McMahill added.
McMahill wants to make it clear, Metro officers are not working with ICE out in the community. They are only calling ICE after an arrest of a non-citizen is made as required by federal law.
“You championed several bills this legislative session, DUI, red light cameras, a lot of things failed this session… Talk to me about your reaction to that,” Passoth requested.
“I’m disappointed, to say the least. You know, I had to really do a lot of soul searching on this one… I think I could have done a bit of a better job on presenting the red light bill and had a maybe a pilot program that they would be more willing to accept… I think those automated cameras would have been great because it would have caused people to think about it every time they got behind the wheel of a car,” McMahill shared.
“There’s no accountability in the court process… My own police officer was killed by a head-on collision on the way home to his three young children and his wife by an individual that had been deported multiple times, arrested for DUI, and had a blood level three times what it should have been. That’s not acceptable… It disgusted me, quite frankly, that politics are the reasons that these things didn’t get passed,” McMahill contended.
“Tesla Cybertrucks are coming to Metro, talk to me about where that’s at, how they’re going to be used?,” Passoth questioned.
“I think July 1st is kind of what I’m looking at for getting these first ten trucks delivered… People always ask me what I’m going to do with them. They’re going to have all kinds of special equipment in them and they’re going to respond to all the most serious calls that we have,” McMahill revealed.
“There’s also another truck that’s coming in, which is the SWAT Tesla truck, the first one being built in the entire country. That is being armored on the outside like one of our regular SWAT trucks by a defense contractor and that’s being built right now as well. That’s maybe a month or two behind the other ones,” McMahill reported.
Watch the full one-on-one interview:
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