The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department saw a 37 percent increase in retirements in 2020, but the agency and the officers union said the rise isn’t linked to the ongoing push for police reforms in Nevada and across the nation.
There were 223 officers who filed for retirement in 2020, Metro spokesman Larry Hadfield said. The department had 163 retirements in 2019, 167 in 2018 and 146 in 2017, the Review-Journal reports.
Hadfield said the department commonly sees clusters of retirements at the end of a calendar year, which is what happened in 2020. He said police do not believe that increased pressure on officers, or turmoil faced by law enforcement in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May, has anything to do with increased retirement numbers.
“If an anti-police environment were driving separations, we would expect to see a large number of separations with years of service insufficient to retire,” Hadfield said in an email. “So far, we have not seen that.”
