About 50 people attended the International Union of Police Associations convention at Paris Las Vegas. Speakers praised cooperation with ICE, while union president Sam Cabral said four vendor body cameras had been taken.
The last bit of business at the Paris Las Vegas gathering came from a vendor booth, not the convention floor.
At the closing session, International Union of Police Associations president Sam Cabral told delegates that somebody had taken four body cameras. The cameras had been reported missing from the booth. It was an awkward coda to a convention built around solidarity among police.
The 23rd Annual Convention drew about 50 people to the Paris casino in late August. Speakers praised police cooperation with federal immigration authorities, attacked calls to defund police and defended officers against criticism. A debate over labor’s limits played out inside a Las Vegas resort where union rules had become a source of complaints.
The available search results contain no official documents confirming the convention date, attendance, reported disappearance of the cameras, or Cabral’s statement.
A police union inside the AFL-CIO
IUPA represents tens of thousands of officers in local departments across the country. It is the only police union affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which it joined in 1979. That puts the union alongside organizations whose members may be arrested by police during labor disputes. The available search results did not provide primary-source documentation to independently verify those membership claims.
Cabral has led IUPA for more than 30 years. His clashes with federation leaders have centered on police reform and racial justice. After police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka called for reform and an end to police militarization. Cabral rejected claims that police were responsible for problems facing Black communities. He also disputed that racism or systematic exclusion shaped police staffing.
When IUPA endorsed Donald Trump’s reelection campaign five years later, Cabral said Democrats had vilified police. In 2020, as protests followed George Floyd’s killing, he called Trumka’s criticism of police «reprehensible» and rejected the federation’s calls to end racial profiling and demilitarize police forces.
The available results offer no usable primary source to verify IUPA’s status within the AFL-CIO or the federation’s response to disputes over police reform. They also do not establish any subsequent official decision or investigation related to the events described here.
The AFL-CIO defended IUPA’s membership, arguing that engagement was preferable to isolation. Its push for police reform later narrowed to a committee, whose report rejected calls to «defund the police.» IUPA stayed in the federation, and Cabral was set to be reelected at the Las Vegas convention.
Speakers praise enforcement partnerships
Mike Fullerton, an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, delivered one of the convention’s clearest messages. He praised information-sharing between law enforcement agencies and endorsed 287(g) agreements, which let local police departments work with ICE. Fullerton said the agreements helped identify and process people subject to deportation.
He said local officers knew the businesses in their neighborhoods. They knew the schools and families, too, and could spot cars that did not belong on a particular street. The remarks cast local familiarity as an enforcement tool, including in states that have banned 287(g) agreements to protect immigrants.
Other speakers portrayed police as under threat from a movement to defund them. Craig Floyd of Citizens Behind The Badge argued against what he called the «defund and defame the police movement.» He cited a 2019 study by Harvard economist Rolando Fryer but left out its finding that Black people were 21 percent more likely than white people to experience a police interaction in which at least a weapon was drawn.
Floyd also cited falling crime since its 1993 peak and said fewer police officers were shot last year than in any year since 1944. He blamed police budget cuts and reduced staffing for public-safety problems. Yet a 2023 survey found that municipalities that had pledged to defund police later raised their budgets beyond earlier levels. The convention treated favorable trends as evidence of police effectiveness and unfavorable ones as the fallout from a policy that never took hold.
Union protection and resort rules
Edward Fisher, who ran the police legal defense fund PORAC, described broad coverage for officers sued over actions connected to their work. The fund could cover an officer who intervened in an incident while off duty at a Las Vegas conference. Fisher said coverage could apply when an officer acted too aggressively while still trying to perform a trained duty, including in cases involving deaths in custody or shootings.
That protection can put police unions at odds with the priorities of other unions. The tension surfaced at the convention itself: one speaker complained that strict resort rules made it hard to move a box, even though those rules existed because the Paris casino’s workforce was unionized. Vegas Report has also covered resort operations during the opening of a Strip hotel.
The gathering came as IUPA faced a multimillion-dollar court judgment and appealed it. Earlier in the year, the union had declared bankruptcy to keep operating during the appeal. The judgment stemmed from a lawsuit by a woman who said a local IUPA official sexually assaulted her during a union event in Las Vegas in 2021.
The available search results do not establish whether the reported camera loss led to an official investigation or other action.
