Police reports and video released of campus officer kneeling on teen near Las Vegas high school
LAS VEGAS (AP) — School officials in Las Vegas have released police reports and body camera footage of a campus officer kneeling on a Black student last year, an incident that drew accusations of police brutality after bystander video of it 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 brandished the previous day and a threat had been made to “shoot up” a Las Vegas school. No weapon was found.
The actions of Elfberg, who is white, pinning the teen beneath his knee next to a patrol vehicle drew public protests, comparisons to the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, calls for Elfberg’s firing and an American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada lawsuit seeking to force school officials to release information.
A student who said police handcuffed him during the encounter for jaywalking told KVVU-TV at the time that the incident reminded him of the killing of Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly 10 minutes.
School officials late Thursday complied with a court order to release the reports and footage of the Feb. 9, 2023, incident near the Durango High School campus. The six videos total more than two hours and include footage of officers talking with the parents of one detained teen before they released him with a citation.
The Las Vegas-area school district argued that most records of the encounter were confidential because of the age of the people who were detained and denied media requests for them, including one submitted by The Associated Press.
The ACLU on Friday called the resistance to its 11-month fight to obtain the records “shameful” and characterized officers’ accounts that the teenagers were stopped during a gun investigation “an attempt to spin the events and avoid accountability for attacking school children.”
Executive Director Athar Haseebullah said in a statement that “this fight is far from over,” noting that a lawsuit by two students who were detained is still active.
The cellphone video of the encounter that went viral last year began with several district police officers detaining two students. As another student walked by recording them with his cellphone, Elfberg yelled to the student, “You want next, dude?”
The video showed the student backing away and lowering his phone before Elfberg shoved him to the ground next to a patrol vehicle. Students in the background could be heard yelling to the officer, “You can’t have him on the ground like that!”
The officer kneeled on the student’s back as he lay face-down on the pavement and kept his knee there until the cellphone video ended about 30 seconds later. At one point, the student could be heard asking his friends to call his mother.
In his report, Elfberg wrote that he had ordered the student to “start walking, at which point he said no.”
“I then grabbed (the teen) who immediately pulled away and started pulling his hands from my grasp, and yelling at me not to touch him,” Elfberg said. He wrote that he then pushed the teen up against a fence, but “he attempted again to remove himself from my grasp, so I then spun him around and took him down to the ground.”
Elfberg’s attorney, Adam Levine, told the AP ahead of the release of the polices that his client, a 14-year police veteran, has been cleared of wrongdoing by the district and remains on the school police force.
“This case highlights the dangers of jumping to a wrong conclusion based upon snippets of video viewed out of context,” Levine said in a statement. The attorney also represents the school district’s police union.
Levine said the bodycam video “actually shows that Lt. Elfberg defused what could have been a very volatile and dangerous situation for both the officers and the involved students,” adding that once Elfberg “brought that situation under control” he was “courteous and professional to both the students and a parent who attempted to get involved.”
Clark County’s school district has its own police department and is the fifth-largest in the U.S. with more than 315,000 students. District police have the authority to make arrests and issue traffic citations on and off campus.
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