LAS VEGAS– Las Vegas school officials have released court-ordered police reports and body camera footage showing a campus officer kneeling on a black student last year — an incident that drew accusations of police brutality after bystanders circulated widely on social media.
In his incident report, Clark County School District Police Lt. Jason Elfberg said the teen, whose name is redacted, refused to move away from officers who were handcuffing another student while investigating a report that a gun had been fired the previous day had been waved and that a threat had been made. made to shoot up a school in Las Vegas. No weapon was found.
The actions of Elfberg, who is white, pinning the teen below his knee next to a patrol vehicle sparked public protests, comparisons to the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, calls for Elfberg to resign and a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada forced that school officials to release information.
Elfberg’s attorney, Adam Levine, told The Associated Press prior to the release of the bodycam videos that his client, a 14-year police veteran, was cleared of wrongdoing by the district and remains on the school police force.
A student who said police handcuffed him for jaywalking during the encounter told KVVU-TV at the time that the incident reminded him of the killing of Floyd, a black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer who spent nearly 10 minutes knelt on his neck.
School officials late Thursday complied with a judge’s order to release police body camera footage of the Feb. 9, 2023, incident near the Durango High School campus. The six video clips distributed by the district, with faces and parts of some other scenes blurred, total more than two hours.
The Las Vegas-area school district argued that most accounts of the encounter were confidential because of the ages of the people detained and that media requests to do so were denied, including one filed by the AP.
The ACLU on Friday called the district’s resistance to the 11-month battle to obtain the data “shameful” and characterized officers’ statements that the teens were stopped during a weapons search as “an attempt to distort events and shift responsibility for avoid attacking schoolchildren. .”
“This fight is far from over,” ACLU Executive Director Athar Haseebullah promised in a statement, noting that a lawsuit against two students the group represents is still pending. The two, whose names have not been made public, were 14 years old. -old male freshmen at school at the time of the confrontation.
The cellphone video of the encounter that went viral began with several district police officers arresting two students. As another student walked by with his cell phone, Elfberg shouted at him, “You want the next one, dude?”
The 55-second video showed the student walking backwards and lowering his phone before Elfberg turned him to the ground next to a patrol vehicle. Students could be heard shouting at the officer in the background: “You can’t have him on the ground like that!”
With the student face down between the curb and the patrol vehicle, the officer knelt on his back, gestured to other young people in the area and kept his knee there until the cellphone video ended about 30 seconds later. At one point you heard the student asking his friends to call his mother.
Separately, police body camera footage showed the teen being handcuffed by another officer as he sat on the sidewalk with his hands behind his back, and Elfberg later acknowledged that the two landed hard on the sidewalk. He encouraged the teen to be examined for injuries, but the teen refused.
In his report, Elfberg wrote that the incident escalated when he ordered the student “to start walking and he said no.”
“I then grabbed (the teen), who immediately pulled away and began pulling his hands out of my grasp, yelling at me not to touch him,” Elfberg said in his report. He wrote that he then pushed the teen against a fence, but “he tried to break free from my grasp again, so I turned him around and brought him to the ground.”
Elfberg wrote that he then pushed the teen against a fence, but “he tried to remove himself from my grasp again, so I spun him around and brought him to the ground.”
At a news conference, Haseebullah, ACLU attorney Christopher Peterson and NAACP Las Vegas President Quentin Savwoir said it appeared Elfberg was annoyed that police activity was being recorded.
Haseebullah called Elfberg “a rowdy police officer” who initiated the incident by “jumping out of his car and approaching students who were looking at him in a way he did not like.” He called on Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson to investigate and charge officers with misconduct.
“What you see is an officer guilty of misconduct,” Haseebullah said.
Wolfson responded by saying the police are investigating and gathering evidence, not his office, and that he has prosecuted officers from police stations across the province for various crimes. He said he did not file a case seeking prosecution in the Durango High School case.
“I am not afraid to file charges in appropriate circumstances, if and when there is sufficient evidence,” he said.
Peterson emphasized that observers have a constitutional right to “film, criticize and interrogate officers” and noted that video showed Elfberg threatening to use pepper spray against bystanders who “bravely stood their ground on a public sidewalk, confronted by the threat of retaliation.”
Later, Elfberg could be heard on his body camera telling a student, “I don’t mind if you answer, dude. What I don’t like is that everyone is nipping at our heels.”
Elfberg’s attorney, Levine, said the bodycam video “actually shows that Lt. Elfberg could have defused a very volatile and dangerous situation for both the officers and the students involved.”
“This case highlights the dangers of drawing the wrong conclusion based on video clips viewed out of context,” Levine said in his statement. The attorney also represents the school district’s police union.
A 200-person police department covers schools in Clark County, the fifth-largest county in the U.S. with more than 315,000 students on more than 350 campuses. District police have the authority to make arrests and issue traffic tickets on and off campus.