Local Author Gives A Realist’s View Of Police Work

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

A Logandale resident, who retired last year after more than 20 years service in the Metropolitan Police Department, has published a book about his remarkable policing career.

Policing Las Vegas by Joe Sobrio, was released in paperback on April 21. And last week it became available in hardcover and E-book formats. It currently can be purchased online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble or authorhouse.com.

Told in an accessible story-telling manner, the book is at once gritty and tender; tragic and comic; disheartening and life-affirming. But it is always honest – sometimes brutally so.

In an interview with The Progress last week, Sobrio said that the book aims to expose the general public to a true sample of what urban cops see every day on their shifts.
“I have always believed that if the public knew what cops really do each day, there wouldn’t be a lot of this anti-police sentiment that we see so much of,” Sobrio said. “The police regularly see the absolute worst in people. I mean, I am writing about the absolute hell that police officers descend into when they knock on a door or stop a car, or see the tragedy in the horrific things that people do to each other.”
Sobrio admitted that he was not quite sure why he had decided to write Policing Las Vegas; though he has thought a lot about it.
“I never quite know how to answer that question,” he said.

Sobrio cited a statistic that indicates that cops have a high death rate in the early years after their retirement. This is thought to be due to the sudden release from a career of pent-up traumatic memories, he said. In a way, Sobrio says he wrote this book to gain a sense of health and closure.
“I figured if I wrote a book, I could close my law enforcement chapter and just kind of push it out of my way and be done with it,” Sobrio said. “Then I could be free to start another life.”

The book is divided into two main sections.
Sobrio says that the first section is meant to be a guide book for young people who would like to serve as police officers.
“It is demystifying the hiring process,” he said. “It gives the reader an idea of what a civil service job is, and it gives an idea of what police departments are looking for and what they’re not.”

Sobrio is uniquely qualified to give that kind of instruction. He spent the last two years of his career as the Director of Human Resources at Metro.
“That job is not all of what people think it is,” Sobrio said. “It is recruiting, background investigations, polygraph testing, approving all testing and hiring instruments and more. It is all your normal human resources functions plus the stuff that they couldn’t figure out where it goes.”
Policing Las Vegas gives an inside look at the hiring process for police departments and gives some best practices on getting hired.

Sobrio said that getting hired in law enforcement is not really as daunting as many people think. First of all, that is because of a deep shortage of candidates applying to be police officers.
“Metro is starving for people,” he said. “We couldn’t fill positions fast enough. It was impossible. And that is a similar story in most police departments across the country.”

“Anyone who wants to be a cop and reads the first half of this book; if they don’t walk away knowing exactly what to do, they didn’t read it right,” Sobrio said. “Because I walk them through how to study, what to study, how to find the material, how to apply, what the recruiter is looking for, what the background investigators look for. It is really a how-to on getting hired in law enforcment.”

In the second half of the book, Sobrio tells stories from his years of patrolling the mean streets of Las Vegas.
Sobrio was hired as a Metro police officer in 2001 and he served as a beat cop for about nine years. He worked in the downtown area for a long time and then was assigned to the Bolden Area Command which is the old west side of Las Vegas.

“In the second half (of the book) I talk about the gang violence we saw,” Sobrio said. “I talk about the need for communities to get involved in crime reduction. I talk about homelessness and suicide and what human beings are capable of doing to each other out there. It is basically an episode of ‘Cops’ but written in a book.”

Some of the stories are harrowing. Like the time when Sobrio nearly shot a 12-year-old who he thought was drawing a gun on him. It turned out to be a toy gun.
“The only thing that saved his life was the street light came on,” Sobrio said. “I was behind a brick wall and I had the drop on him. My finger was on the trigger and I was ready to shoot him. He reached for it and I waited for the recoil. Then the lights came on and I saw it was a BB gun. That was a tough one.”

Other stories are funny. Like the time he rushed to a commercial center to aid a colleague who was in a fight with a subject while trying to apprehend him. He pulled into the parking lot and jumped out of the car to engage.
“I got out of the car to help and my foot stepped into a puddle of water,” Sobrio said. “That will matter in a minute.”

Then his colleague directed his attention to the fact that his car had not been put in park and was moving right toward them. Sobrio jumped back in the car as it came near and tried to slam on the brake. But his wet foot slipped off the brake pedal and punched the gas pedal to the floor instead.
“I drove straight into Kessler’s Music store which was right there,” he said. “There were guitars and pianos and harps everywhere. So that was a pretty funny story.”

One of the stories that still affects Sobrio the most is about the senseless death of a four-year-old girl named Dayla Pizzoferrato.

In 2011, Dayla’s father and grandfather had taken her and her twin brother out in the desert to go target shooting. A call came in to the police that the girl had just fallen from the back of the tailgate on a truck and was now unresponsive.

“I wasn’t sure how a kid could just fall off the tailgate of a truck,” Sobrio writes in the book. “I looked at the truck and saw what I immediately recognized as brain matter all over the side quarter panel. I absolutely felt sick.”

Turns out that, just over a hill and in a ravine just to the south of where Dayla’s group was, another group was target shooting too. A stray bullet had apparently ricocheted off of something and eventually found little Dayla’s head.
“In my time in law enforcement, I have seen a lot,” Sobrio writes. “I have also forgotten a lot. But I will never forget Dayla.”