Police mum about new details in internal probe
Facebook posting gets another look after violent rallies, deaths in Virginia
A day after restricting the head of the Santa Fe police union to desk duty, police Chief Patrick Gallagher confirmed he had learned something new regarding the six-month internal investigation of the union chief ’s inflammatory Facebook posts.
Gallagher, though, declined to specify what additional details had been made known to him in the investigation of Sgt. Troy Baker, a 22-year veteran of the police department.
“It was something related to the posts that we all knew about,” Gallagher said. “That’s all I can tell you.” Gallagher said Baker is likely to remain on desk duty throughout the internal affairs investigation of Baker’s postings about Muslims, African-Americans, women and illegal immigration.
White supremacist rallies last week in Charlottesville, Va., where a man plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman, brought renewed attention to Baker’s posts from February.
On Facebook, Baker had shared an image with the heading “All lives splatter.” It depicted a vehicle driving through cartoon stick figures. “Nobody cares about your protest,” the rest of the image reads. “Moral of the story .. Stay off the road!!”
Gallagher said violence in Charlottesville and the Santa Fe community’s “collective concern” about it led him to inquire about the progress of the internal investigation of Baker.
“I said, ‘Let me look in and see where we’re at on this,’ ” Gallagher said. “I found out something and said, ‘OK, I need to put [Baker] on desk duty.’ ”
Baker, who is paid $33.41 an hour, according to city records, did not return a message seeking comment.
As for the internal investigation of Baker lasting months, Gallagher said the process cannot be rushed.
“We do our due diligence, and also [Baker] is entitled to due process,” Gallagher said.
Investigators have 180 days to complete an internal affairs review from the day it is opened, but they can request extensions, said Lt. Thomas Grundler, an investigator in the police department’s professional standards division.
The internal investigation of Baker began in February. Grundler could not immediately say whether an extension had been requested, though he said he suspected one had.
The internal investigation should wrap up within a matter of weeks, Gallagher said.