The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) recently rolled out a new Asian American Pacific Islander Alliance, Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
The Alliance is the third community group established by the LVMPD, alongside the department’s Hispanic Alliance and Black Community Alliance. It is set to convene every two months to discuss issues affecting the community.
At the Alliance’s first meeting on June 27, LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill said the department historically ostracized the AAPI community, in a pattern of barriers he noticed between select communities and the police when he became sheriff, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal.
According to a report by FOX 5 Las Vegas, criminal activity in Las Vegas’s Chinatown is underreported, which the establishment of the Alliance seeks to fix.
“What we’re really trying to do is encourage that relationship building so that all of these folks feel the level of trust that we want to develop with them so that we’ll increase that reporting, and we can focus in on the individuals that are targeting them,” McMahill said to FOX 5 Las Vegas.
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Attended by local government officials and teams, including that of Rep. Dina Titus, Assemblywoman Brittney Miller, and the AANHPI Nevada Legislative Caucus, the meeting celebrated AAPI cultures with presentations of Hawaiian and Maori dances and introduced community engagement specialists to the group, Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote.
Las Vegas has prominent Filipino and Hawaiian communities — so much so that Las Vegas is nicknamed “the Ninth Island.” The majority of Las Vegas’s AAPI community is ethnically Filipino, with more than 200,000 residents of Filipino descent, making the Alliance particularly significant.
LVMPD Director of Community Engagement Rachel Skidmore noted that the department saw 20 anti-Asian hate crimes reported in the past four years, with most cases involving perpetrators unknown to the victims, according to Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“We cannot, as LVMPD, arrest our way out of the problems that we face,” Skidmore said.
The LVMPD’s Office of Community Engagement said on Facebook that it “(looks) forward to enhancing communication and relationships between the LVMPD and the AAPI community.”
“Love that Sheriff (McMahill) spoke about his commitment to the community and to the businesses in the Spring Mountain Corridor,” one attendee posted on social media platform X. “This is just the beginning!”
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