It is understood that politicians on both sides of the bench and in any race have the tendency to discard the truth and tell their constituents whatever they want those voters to know or whatever they think their audience wants to know.Case in point is the reality that we see every day in our community when we watch and read about in the news, all those daily shootings, officer-involved shootings, the number of robberies, home invasions, casinos being robbed and many other crimes being committed in our city.
During the last election, the winner of the Sheriff’s race, Joseph Lombardo, perhaps won the election by telling the voters that he was going to be the White Knight of the modern world, fighting crime as no one else has done ever before.
Of course, Sheriff Lombardo was already elected by the elites of local politics in the community and he knew very well that regardless of what he would tell the voters he would be reelected so he did not have to lie but it has become a habit among politicians to lie.
We have learned that the morale in the police department is very low if we listen to the rank and file and trust their opinion, which we do.
We have a very capable police force; our police department is way above the national average but the officers may not have the backing and support of the political police administration, giving them a sense of instability and possibly personal and mental insecurity as well.
It is time for Sheriff Lombardo to stop playing politics and stop trying to please those big campaign donors in the gaming world, and it’s time to start playing cops and robbers for real to give the community the safety and the protection they need and deserve.
It is a reality that we are no longer a small community and the population has grown multiple times and with that growth, the crime rate has also grown, but the community is well aware that as the crime rate goes up with the community growing every day, the police department is also growing and while in the old days the Sheriff’s Office had only a small amount of officers, that has now multiplied and the budget has astronomically gone up.
We never before heard of a casino being robbed at gunpoint and now it has become nothing to be surprised at. Also, we never before heard of a shootout like at the OK Corral happening in the middle of the Strip,
but such things already happen and have happened more than on one
occasion.
People no longer feel safe in their own homes and are scared to open the front door and be surprised with someone pushing their way in to take whatever they can find at gunpoint.
Business owners never know what they are going to find in their place of business when they arrive in the morning. Some places have been robbed twice in just one weekend! They have a lot of nerve or they are counting on the inability of the police officers to respond in a timely matter.
The police administration must learn that the casino-owners are not the only citizens who need protection and the security of a safe environment.
Perhaps if Sheriff Lombardo believes that the job is too big for him, he could think of leaving the office. But if his ego is too big to do that, he could create a plan to go back to the old days when there was a police department for Las Vegas and a Sheriff’s Department for the county; after all, Clark County is a very big county but could be handled by their big department.
Mesquite is under the jurisdiction of Clark County but the city has its own police department; North Las Vegas, Henderson and Boulder City are also under Clark County’s jurisdiction but each city has its own police department and we are wondering why not Las Vegas?
Why does Las Vegas have to be the stepchild in this city classification order? The Sheriff will have the prestige of being the Clark County Sheriff on the world-famous Strip and Las Vegans could take their city back.
It may seem a little too radical; it may seem a little out of context, but in reality, it is not too bad of an idea because if we look back at the many sheriff’s races, with the exception of John McCarthy, all the sheriffs have been appointed by their predecessors — and if that is the case, it means that if Lombardo could not handle the job than not one of those “second-in-command” could handle the job either.
Las Vegas is no longer a town; Las Vegas is a cosmopolitan city and its residents need to live like those in a cosmopolitan city. We deserve it.
Attachments area
Follow