A Las Vegas police union has asked a judge to quit her position on the bench after she made a slick remark to a Black man about his choice to engage law enforcement.
An organization representing police has taken exception with the court official, saying her comments were “disparaging” to the men and women in blue and inferred those in uniform have an implicit bias against certain people because of their race.
On Wednesday, July 13, the Las Vegas Police Protective Association is calling for Erika Ballou, a district judge, to resign after a video of her remarks she made on Monday, July 11 about the complicated (and often adversarial) relationship between African-Americans and the police went viral, reports the Daily Mail.
The LVPPA, which represents Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers, posted the footage on its Facebook page late on Wednesday, blasting the judge’s controversial statement days earlier in the caption.
Ballou, a Black woman, said to the defendant, who had been arrested on charges of committing battery against an officer in the state while on probation, he should have kept his distance from the cop.
“You’re a Black man in America, you know you don’t want to be nowhere where cops are,” She is heard in the video saying.
“You listen to me, you know you don’t want to be nowhere where cops are. Because I know I don’t, and I’m a middle-aged, middle-class Black woman. I don’t want to be around where the cops are because I don’t know if I’m going to walk away alive or not,” Ballou continued.
The remarks were made during a hearing where the Clark County District Attorney’s Office was seeking a revocation of the man’s probation.
A spokesperson from the LVPPA released a statement saying, “On behalf of the men and women of law enforcement, the Las Vegas Police Protective Association takes exception to Judge Erika Ballou’s disparaging comments about police officers.”
‘We call upon Judge Ballou to resign from the bench. We also ask the Judicial Ethics Commission to sanction her for violating the Nevada Code of Judicial Conduct,” the statement continued. ‘Among other obligations, the rules require the judiciary to, ‘[A]spire at all times to conduct that ensures the greatest possible public confidence in their independence, impartiality, integrity, and competence.’
According to the union, the judge demonstrated her own bias “against law enforcement” and thus “cannot live up to the standards required of a jurist.” Further, the organization contends when she claimed that she is never certain if she will “walk away alive or not” after engaging with an officer was “both unethical and irresponsible.”
“Police officers and the law-abiding citizens of our community deserve better from the judiciary,” the comment concluded.
Union President Steve Grammas commented further saying he has spoken to officers about Ballou’s comments and said “they all felt horrible that a judge would make the inference that if this judge was hanging around police, that she may not make it out with her life.”
The officers, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, are asking the Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline to sanction the judge for what they believe is a violation of the Nevada Code of Judicial Conduct, which states all who assume the officer should “aspire at all times to conduct that ensures the greatest possible public confidence in their independence, impartiality, integrity, and competence.”
Paul Deyhle, the executive director of the NCJD, said, legally, he is not able to say whether or not a complaint has been filed against Ballou, adding, “The commission is aware of the news reports concerning the judge, and any complaints filed will be considered by the commission.”
This is not the first time Ballou took a controversial position about Blackness in the courtroom.
In 2016, when she was a deputy public defender, she refused to remove her “Black Lives Matter” button in the courtroom during a trial where she was representing a white domestic battery defendant at a sentencing hearing.
Despite being asked by Clark County District Court Judge Douglas Herndon, now a Nevada Supreme Court justice, she stood firm — but eventually, she acquiesced after being convinced her pin could potentially interfere with cases because courtrooms should be “viewpoint-neutral.”
She later would say wearing the button was in response to the police union asking judges not to have “Black Lives Matter propaganda” in courtrooms and that ‘in a free country, I shouldn’t be afraid of the police, but I am.”
Ballou has defended her statements from the bench, in remakes shared through the District Court spokeswoman Mary Ann Price, saying, “I support proper law enforcement. What the record shows is that I communicate with those who appear before me in a manner that is straightforward and understandable.”
The judge is not standing alone. The NAACP released a statement on Tuesday, July 19, in support of Ballou and her right to freedom of speech.
The Las Vegas chapter of the NAACP said her comments “reflect the grim reality for African Americans” in Clark County and across the nation, adding, “Her statements reflect not only her truths but also the community’s truth. People of color and African Americans, in particular, are disproportionately killed by police.”
The NAACP chapter noted research from 2016 that revealed: “Out of 8,990,049 total arrests in the United States, 2,407,003 of those arrests were for Black people.”
Also cited in the statement was a five-year detailed analysis of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department based on its own data.
According to the force’s reports, between 2017 and 2021, over 31 percent of the people shot by officers in the LVMPD were Black. A startling percentage when one considers people that identify as Black in Nevada make up 10 percent of the population, based on the most recent census findings.
Nevada state government statistics for 2021 also claim 52.7 percent of violent crimes are committed by Blacks.
The civil rights organization also challenged the LVPPA’s call for her to be sanctioned, saying, “its misplaced reliance on the preamble to the Nevada Code of Judicial Conduct in an attempt to distract the public from the truth regarding police shootings of people of color in Clark County.”
The NAACP’s statement continued, “It is our position that Judge Ballou imposed the adequate sentence while counseling the defendant that he ‘should have walked away.’”
“Nothing in Judge Ballou’s statements were untrue and the LVPPA’s position on this issue reflects its defensiveness based partly on the fact that the truth hurts.”
Other social justice and advocacy organizations like the ACLU of Nevada and the Clark County Black Caucus released other statements supporting the judge.
No word has been made public about if Ballou will be sanctioned by the judicial governance body.
Ballou reportedly did revoke the man’s probation at the hearing.
