Question of the Day - 19 April 2020

Las Vegas Metro shuffled us through multiple departments before simply not answering your question. In fact, we have rarely encountered so much obfuscation (including a demand for money) in Question of the Day history. In addition, Metro’s online Crime Mapping software appears to be on the fritz. We ran a search for DWIs in the period of March 8 (nine days before the mass closure) through April 4 and couldn’t find an arrest. Not one. We refined that to March 1-17 and 18-31. Twice. Still nothing. 

Nor could we find any data for Las Vegas or Nevada in an extensive online search.

We did, however, turn up some statistics from other states. For example, in two counties in central Florida, state troopers made 34 drunk-driving arrests in 2018 from March 17 through March 27; in 2019, that number increased to 39. But for the same period this year, troopers made just 15 DUI arrests (down by 62% year over year). Speeding citations, on the other hand, are up significantly and the speeds on wide-open interstates are excessive -- up to 40 mph over the limit. Many of these speeding tickets require court appearances.  

And in Pennsylvania, when comparing last week's arrests with the week prior to the outbreak, DUIs dropped by 71%.

So we can extrapolate a similar result in Las Vegas.

In addition, auto-crash-related fatalities in Nevada in March plummeted 48% — 12 deaths compared to last year’s 23. Had it not been for the bar closures, those numbers would probably have been higher, as the first quarter of 2020 had 61 crash deaths, two fewer than the first three months of 2019.

None of this means that Las Vegas is particularly crime free. Auto thefts are still high and there's a greatly increased incidence of miscellaneous “disturbance” calls, many of which relate to domestic situations. Domestic violence reports have skyrocketed all around the globe, as coronavirus lockdowns force victims into weeks-long close contact with their abusers, experts say.