Government transparency is a matter of trust
Santa Fe has seen at least a couple of large protests since George Floyd was killed when a Minneapolis policeman knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes on May 25.
In the wake of the latest death of an African American during an encounter with police, there have been protests around the country, and many cities are discussing major changes in police department policies and structures. There’s talk of disbanding some police departments and rebuilding them from scratch.
In Santa Fe, Mayor Alan Webber says he wants his city to become “a model of 21st-century policing.”
He’s reviewing use-of-force policies, and says he wants to build a sense of trust between the police and the community. Webber was speaking after a non-fatal police shooting of a man with a knife or machete who had wounded two employees at the Big R store.
The SFPD has a good longterm record on use of force, at least in comparison to many other law enforcement agencies. There have been regular reports over the years of the department calling off highspeed chases in the interest of safety and officers standing down or waiting out crisis situations instead of going in with guns blasting.
Webber last week cited a 2018 incident where a convenience store clerk called the cops to say she wanted a black student visiting Santa Fe out of the store because “he’s arrogant, because he’s black.” The mayor says the responding officer told the student that the Constitution rules in Santa Fe and he wouldn’t be arrested.
But, in recent years, there have been troubling cases that, if they happened now, post-George Floyd, might have had much more impact on the public perception of the Santa Fe police.
Most seriously, in 2017, two officers killed a schizophrenic young man who had broken into his former apartment, stabbed a caseworker sent to check on him and then threw what police called homemade explosives that didn’t explode (apparently things a small child might come up with) at officers during a SWAT standoff. The devices weren’t taken seriously enough to order an evacuation of the area or keep officers from approaching the apartment.
Within a few seconds of an officer ripping the window out of the wall of the man’s ground-floor unit, the man was shot dead in a hail of at least 17 bullets fired by two officers. Police said the man was approaching the window hole with a big knife. The officer who fired all but one of the shots said he thought the man had a gun, adding he believed he was seeing the same silver revolver he had used while training a cadet earlier in the day. This officer’s lapel camera, which might have provided a view of what he could see before the fatal shooting, wasn’t on.
A team of New Mexico district attorneys who reviewed the case recommended against prosecution of the officers. The city settled a civil lawsuit with a maximum $400,000 payment.
Did the officers follow policy or were they ever disciplined? The public has never been told.
New Mexico courts have ruled that disciplinary actions are mere “matters of opinion” that can remain confidential under the state’s Open Records Act. Santa Fe extends the secrecy to all records having to do with internal police investigations. But the Albuquerque Police Department — somehow, some way and without facing legal Armageddon — releases internal affairs reports and disciplinary records, at least if reporters are persistent.
The Legislature could fix this problem by clarifying the appropriate statute; the judicial system could, too, via a case filed by the Santa Fe Reporter. But the total lack of transparency about what happens when complaints are made against officers is a major stumbling block for building that “trust” between police agencies and the public that Webber says he wants.
Another black eye for the SFPD, relevant anew now that Black Lives Matter protests have exploded after Floyd’s death in Minnesota, came in 2017 when an officer — not just any officer, but the head of the Santa Fe police union — posted a series of offensive memes on Facebook.
One of the posts featured a car running over stick figures with the text “All Lives Splatter. Nobody cares about your protest. Moral of the story... stay off the road!!”
Another one showed a Confederate flag with the words “Now lets eliminate the N.A.A.C.P. which in name alone is racist as is its purpose! There is no room in this country for a separate race to have a membership where holding an office requires that you be black.”
This was fake news; white people hold leadership positions in the NAACP, which was born out of horror over the lynchings of black Americans.
There was an internal investigation of Sgt. Troy Baker and he resigned after he was placed on desk duty. But was he ever disciplined for the memes? What were the findings of the investigation? Answering those questions would help build trust about attitudes within the police department.
There was a case years ago when the city did provide information on an internal affairs investigation. In 2011, Baker and another officer were fired for allegedly falsifying reports on the rough takedown of a suspect in a Walmart parking lot.
Details of the accusations were made public as the case played out. Eventually, an arbitrator overturned the firings — an outcome relevant to the current debate over how difficult it can be to fire bad-acting officers under the agreements between local governments and police unions.
There are a lot of difficult issues about policies, procedures, culture and race as Santa Fe and other cities try to move forward on how to improve policing amid the current national uproar. But transparency should be the easy part.