LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — In just a week, more than 300 schools across Clark County will once again be filled with students.
It has Lieutenant Bryan Zink preparing for a very busy start of the school year.
“We’ve got our plans in place. We’ve got our schedules together with our officers to come in early and stay a little bit late to make sure we have as many people on the streets as possible,” Lt. Zink said.
It’s an around the clock job for the Clark County School District Police Department, whether school is in session or not.
Lt. Zink told FOX5 the end of one school year almost immediately leads into preparation for the next.
“As the school years end, we look at all the data and everything we were involved in that past year, possibly even the year before that, compare that data and start to try to figure out what we can do next year to just make things more safe,” Lt. Zink said.
It’s a lot of schools to sift through, including 43 institutions in North Las Vegas.
FOX5 attended a community meeting in North Las Vegas in July where CCSDPD presented recent crime statistics for North Las Vegas Schools.
Many of the areas features, robberies, shootings, property damage, etc., all showed significant drops between the 2023-24 and the 2024-25 school year.
The largest numbers were tied to physical violence, fights and batteries.
Those also saw large decreases year over year (19% drop in fights, 27% drop in batteries) and Lt. Zink said even those numbers could don’t exclusively illustrate fighting in schools specifically.
“Those numbers were in general the number of fight calls that were called into our dispatch. That doesn’t mean there were specifically that many on our campuses,” Lt. Zink said.
“We don’t want people to think that because as kids leave school they go into the neighborhoods and the communities and they may get into a fight or something like that. If they call local jurisdiction, that call automatically comes to us.”
Lt. Zink credited many recent safety measures put in place coming out of the pandemic for helping bring in school crime down not just in North Las Vegas but the entire district.
Those include mandating all exterior school doors be locked, except the main entrance, once the school day starts as well as giving district staff Centigex badges allowing them to provide quicker alerts to law enforcement in the event of an emergency.
“If there’s an issue on campus where they need immediate help, they can push that button. It sets off alarms at the school and then also contacts our dispatch center,” Lt. Zink said.
“We’re a 24 hour, 7 day a week police department. We have patrols out on the streets 24 hours a day. We’re here 365 days a year. Every day, all day.”
One of the few increases from the numbers shared was a spike in neglect and abuse situations.
Lt. Zink said they try to provide an all encompassing approach to getting students proper attention, working alongside child services when appropriate.
Copyright 2025 KVVU. All rights reserved.
