It’s a tradition. Young himself was similarly handpicked and anointed by former Sheriff Jerry Keller.

The claimed benefit of such a de facto line of “anointed” successors is that the transitions are smooth. But that’s also the problem.

Bill Young, for all his personal merits, did little to even attempt to shake up or challenge the established “culture” at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

As the archive of backroom casino videos acquired by local attorney Bob Nersesian under the Freedom of Information Act attest, Metro police to this day remain far more likely to arrest and charge a legal “advantage card player” who calls them for help while being “backroomed” by casino security officers, than they are to charge those casino security officers with any crime for detaining and photographing -- even beating and handcuffing -- such players against their will.

In fact, let’s be a little more specific. So far as I’ve been able to determine, no private casino officer in this town has ever been arrested or charged with beating up, kidnapping, or holding a legal card counter against his will, even though the state Supreme Court has ruled that card counting and other applications of skill are perfectly legal at the tables.

Meantime, federal investigators continue to find it necessary to probe far too many deaths of unarmed civilians at the hands of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police.

Yes, the valley’s coroner’s inquest system almost universally finds such shootings justifiable, after the shooters offer intriguingly uniform and predictable testimony about the suspects making “furtive movements toward their waistbands.” (Bill Young’s anointed successor, Undersheriff Dog Gillespie, asked the press for patience after his boys plugged a fleeing, handcuffed 17-year-old youth twice in the back eight days ago, killing murder suspect Swuave Lopez. “I know there will be questions so please be patient with us,” the undersheriff asked. While they try to figure out how both officers will claim to have simultaneously seen the just-searched fleeing suspect “make furtive movements toward his waistband”?)

No, running from police after you’re arrested isn’t smart. But for the record, the U.S. Supreme court ruled in 1985, in Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1: “The use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances, is constitutionally unreasonable. It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so. ...”

The undersheriff urges the public to reserve its judgment till the coroner’s inquest, in June. But the Clark County coroner’s inquest system is a joke. In the past 30 years -- as far as records from the coroner’s office go back -- on-duty law enforcement officers have killed about 100 people in Clark County, and no officer has been held criminally responsible in any of those deaths. (Just one coroner’s inquest found Las Vegas officers Jerry Weaver and Arthur Summers criminally negligent for killing Darryl J. Taylor in 1976, but that verdict was overruled by a Clark County grand jury.)

Police claim the coroner’s inquests are open to the public, but they’re not -- I myself was refused admission to the courtroom by two armed and surly bailiffs during the last such charade, despite plenty of open seats. Police claim the public can get their questions answered there, but the public can’t even ask questions, let alone get them answered.

Attorneys for the victims have no prior access to the officers’ testimony or evidence (including videotapes, if any), nor can they cross-examine. Hilariously, this is blamed on “federal privacy laws.”

The hearing masters, who dress up like judges and instruct the juries they have no choice but to acquit if the officers offer unrefuted and astonishingly similar testimony about “furtive movements toward his waistband” (unrefuted because the only witnesses likely to disagree are conveniently dead), instruct us that only the families and their attorneys can submit questions, in writing.

Why? Because that’s how they choose to interpret a law that says questions may be submitted by “any interested parties.”

Then, when the victim’s family submits a written question, asking if the officer was on steroids at the time of the shooting (the Perrin case), the hearing master quietly wads it up and throws it away.

But taxpayers as often as not shell out six-figure damage settlements to the survivors of men like Ronald Perrin, 32, armed only with a basketball when “badge-heavy” Metro Officer Bruce Gentner emptied his 14-round Glock at him in 1999, and Orlando Barlow, 28, shot and killed with a .223 rifle by Officer Brian Hartman as Barlow kneeled unarmed in a suburban front yard in 2003.

(Dave Kallas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, later called a press conference to insist the “BDRT” T-shirts donned by members of Metro’s Southwest 11 District to celebrate the Barlow hit -- emblazoned with AR-15s like the weapon used that night -- stood for “Big Dogs Run Together,” not the rumored “Baby’s Daddy Removal Team.”)

Even though the coroner’s jury voted 6-1 to let Officer Gentner walk, jury foreman Mark LePage said Gentner went too far when he shot John Perrin that April night at Tropicana Avenue and Rainbow Boulevard. “We all came to the conclusion that we couldn’t convict him, but we all had reservations about what had happened,” LePage said at the time.

LePage said as long as inquest juries are instructed that a homicide is justifiable providing the officer who kills merely perceived a threat -- even if the victim turns out to have been unarmed -- then an officer’s use of deadly force will never be found criminally negligent. “Several jurors voiced their difficulty with the fact that most of the shots came from the rear,” LePage said. “Everyone had a problem with that. He (Perrin) had his back to the officer.”

LePage said state law needs to be changed so officers cannot shoot suspects until certain the individual poses a threat to their safety.

“The way the system is now, the cop always walks.”

And no, there haven’t been “just those two.” Look up Charles Bush, Daniel Mendoza, and Henry Rowe, for starters.

(I loved the 1996 coroner’s inquest for hapless hobo Henry Rowe. Cops initially said chemical tests on Rowe’s clothing as well as the officer’s would prove or disprove Officer George Pease’s assertion that Rowe grabbed Pease’s gun after the officer rousted him in his cardboard shack late at night, firing at the officer and missing multiple times, whereupon Officer Pease had to slit Rowe’s throat and shoot him in the head -- Officer Pease’s third on-duty kill, all conveniently lacking any witnesses. By the time of the inquest, though, Metro had decided not to run the chemical tests, explaining they’d be costly and most likely “inconclusive.” And if you believe that, I’ve got some “furtive movements toward the waistband” that I can sell you at a reasonable price, should you ever find yourself in need of one.)

Official acts echo this attitude. In January of this year, Sheriff Young’s department issued a seemingly routine annual report that there had been 180 homicides investigated in the Las Vegas Valley in the year 2005 -- a new record in the fast-growing city. But when I called him a few days later to challenge that figure, Homicide Lt. Lewis Roberts agreed there had been 13 officer-involved shootings in 2005, nine of which had resulted in deaths -- and that none of those nine deaths had been included in the 180 figure.
Bill Young did not create this attitude -- that citizens killed by Metro “don’t count.” But neither has a succession of Metro “insider” sheriffs ever challenged it.

Now, if Sheriff Young has his way, look for the tradition of Clark County sheriffs hand-picked by their predecessors to continue -- along with unconstitutional strong-arming and imprisonment of winning card players in casino back rooms, and coroner’s juries giving every cop a pat on the back when the occasional unarmed hobo or no-account negro is strangled in his home or shot dead for “reaching toward his waistband.”

Cause it’s all gonna be “business as usual” at Metro.