What happens in vegas…is being overhead by law enforcement wiretaps

TND Guest Contributor:  Michael Chamberlain | 

Whatever your odds of winning at Nevada’s casinos you may stand a better chance of being wiretapped by law enforcement in the Silver State. A person’s odds of being wiretapped in Nevada are far greater than in any other state, according to a new report.

According to figures the Pew Research Center obtained from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, Nevada leads the nation in the number of wiretap authorizations per 500,000 people. And the competition is not even close.

With 38.2 wiretap authorizations in 2013 per 500,000 residents, Nevada’s rate is more than three times that of second-place Colorado’s 12.4. In fact, the next three highest states – Colorado, California and New York – put together still don’t come close to Nevada’s rate.

Pew was able only to guess at the reasons for the astronomical rate of wiretaps authorized in Nevada.

Why are there so many wiretaps in Nevada? We don’t really know: Law-enforcement officials in the state didn’t respond to our inquiries. The state does have the second-highest violent-crime rate in 2012, with 607.6 incidents per 100,000 people, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. However, those figures may be skewed by Nevada’s fairly small resident population (2.8 million), the basis for the rate calculation, versus the millions of tourists who pass through each year.

Just 2.8 million people reside in the Silver State but, with around 40 million tourists visiting each year, there are about another half-million non-residents in the state at any one time. However, even factoring in tourists does not account for the extraordinary number of wiretaps per population compared to other states.

Nearly all of the wiretaps were installed by law enforcement in Clark County. Only one wiretap was installed in Nevada by a federal jurisdiction in 2013, while 178 wiretaps were approved by courts and installed by Clark County law enforcement. Wiretaps resulted in 134 arrests and 78 convictions in Nevada in 2013 though some of those could have been from wiretaps from previous years.

Despite its relatively small population, Nevada was one of the top four states in total wiretapping activity in 2013. Those four states – California, New York, Nevada and Florida – comprised more than half of the nation’s wiretaps in 2013. In only one other jurisdiction in the country, Riverside, CA, were more wiretaps authorized than Clark County.

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Michael Chamberlain is the Editor of Watchdog Wire – Nevada. Please contact him at [email protected] for story ideas or to get involved in citizen journalism in Nevada. Follow Michael on Twitter: @michaelpchamber

Watchdog.org is an online news organization that publishes articles by independent journalists covering state-specific and local government activity. The program began in September 2009, a project of Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting new media journalism.

This article is reprinted with permission.