Not naming Las Vegas killer wasn’t a consideration
Coverage of the slaughter of innocent, fun-seeking concertgoers in Las Vegas last week drew a familiar reaction from a segment of our readership.
The message is one I have heard before: Shame on you for printing the name of the man who pulled the trigger — over and over and over again, killing nearly 60 people and injuring hundreds of others.
Wrote one reader: “You are only encouraging other mentally ill people to commit violent acts to get publicity. You can discuss the incident and tell us all about the shooter without a name or picture. Irresponsible!”
Publicity? The shooter is dead. He has derived no earthly benefit from the publication of his name. And his photo appeared once, very small, and deep inside the Tuesday paper.
Though there have been copycat killers in the past, I have seen no evidence to support the notion that printing someone’s name along with the details of a heinous crime did more to inspire a copycat than reporting the facts without a name.
On the other hand, it goes against human nature and our mission as journalists to leave out the name of someone at the center of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and what was arguably the biggest story on the planet in that day’s paper.
Human nature for most of us at a time like that is to wonder first what happened, followed quickly by who could do such a thing and why? And our job is to answer those questions and many others as best we can. To edit out the name of the perpetrator would leave a giant hole in the story.
It also would quickly become awkward and confusing to write stories about
“Because of the open nature of casinos and hotels, it’s almost impossible to do the search you do at an airport,” said Ed Davis, who was the police commissioner in Boston during the Boston Marathon bombing and is now an adviser to the American Gaming Association, the casino industry group. “Unfortunately, Las Vegas is a big, soft target,” Davis said, “and the fact that it hasn’t happened here before is a miracle.”
What seems clear, though, is that Paddock succeeded in bringing that arsenal into his suite days before the shooting without attracting notice, despite the presence of hundreds of video and surveillance cameras in the casino and security officers and employees who are trained to look for suspicious behavior. This has prompted questions about what else the hotel could have done.
Two spokeswomen for the Mandalay Bay declined to comment on the security at the hotel and casino.
Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department also pushed back at critics who say the security at the hotel was lax.
“The Mandalay Bay security was fantastic,” Lombardo said this past week. “I don’t want anyone to think it’s not safe to stay at one of our hotels.”
He then suggested that no amount of planning could have prevented the attack. “The world has changed,” he said. “Who would have ever imagined this situation?”
Others, though, suggest that more could be done. Last year, Steve Wynn, chief executive of Wynn Resorts and owner of some of the biggest casinos and hotels in the city, said Las Vegas was a “target city” because of the tens of millions of visitors who cram its streets, tourist attractions and hotels and casinos. In the past year, he said, he has installed unseen metal detectors and hired former Navy SEALS, FBI and CIA agents to work undercover in his Las Vegas facilities.
“You know why we are a big target?” Wynn said in an interview last year with a Nevada TV station. “This place is chock-full, in a relatively small place between the Sahara and Tropicana, of all of those folks, and they regularly congregate at night in 10- and 20,000 bundles. This city is tempting for all of those reasons.”
Wynn did not mention that the Nevada Gaming Control Board, which licenses casinos in the state, does not regulate security at the hotels attached to casinos. A.G. Burnett, chairman of the control board, said that a task force was formed several years ago so that his agency, law-enforcement agencies and the casino operators could share best practices. The control board, he said, has not had to develop regulations to govern security at the hotels because the operators have done a good job on their own.
“They’ve been so good doing security outside the casino that we didn’t feel we had to go further than that,” he said, but, “it will be something we will all look at as a state.”
Some people who work at Mandalay Bay have had their doubts that the casino was doing enough.
“It doesn’t seem like there’s a presence or anything that would deter something,” said Jacque Holmes, who moved to Las Vegas from Farmington, Connecticut, and works in Paradiso, a women’s clothing shop that faces the casino in Mandalay Bay.
“That’s why kids come here and party,” she said.
Holmes said the mentality in the hotel is that when a bag is left unattended, it does not raise the same alarm that it might in New York.
“There’s no deterrent,” she said, “There’s nothing.”
And though the hotel does not allow people to bring guns or other weapons onto the property, a hotel employee said that hotel staff could do only so much to prevent people from sneaking them in.
“Technically, every bag could be considered a suspicious bag because we don’t know what’s inside,” said the employee, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “We’re not allowed to ask guests what’s in their bags. So unless we hear ticking, we cannot query a guest on what’s in their luggage.”
When workers do see that someone is trying to bring in weapons, they alert security, the employee said.
T.J. Lopez, general manager of Starlight Tattoo, a shop that also faces the casino, said the mindset in Las Vegas is not to worry too much about what people are doing.
“We don’t want to scare people, because it’s Las Vegas, and we’re so dependent on tourism,” he said. “It’s sad that we didn’t think about it until this happened.”