Short-staffed SFPD lets data on guns lapse
City unable to confirm recent high-profile incidents indicate uptick in gun violence
Ask shift supervisors at the Santa Fe Police Department what they’re seeing in the field, and it’s not unusual to hear about guns.
“In the summer months, it seems like we couldn’t go two days or three days without some kind of firearm being used in the graveyard hours,” said Lt. Matthew Champlin, who supervises the overnight shift.
Gun violence, he said, isn’t like it was earlier this decade when he worked on the graveyard shift as a patrol officer. Back then, he said, police would respond to a shots-fired call and not find anything. Now, he said, they find shell casings and shooting victims.
“I’d definitely say it’s more frequent,” Champlin said.
In the past few months, Santa Fe police have responded to several highprofile incidents involving guns — shots fired during a late-night altercation near a downtown bar and the fatal shooting of a Michigan man off Airport Road. A teenage suspect has been charged in the latter incident.
Despite what appears to be an increase in gun crimes, the evidence is largely anecdotal. Police say they don’t closely track or analyze data on gun use in Santa Fe. That means downstream questions about gun crimes — such as where they happen most frequently, what types of firearms are used and the criminal activities they’re used for — are not easy to answer.
“We do not regularly track gun crimes,” Santa Fe police spokesman Greg Gurulé wrote in a recent email. “If we do specialized gun-tracking it’s when we are trying to determine a crime connection suggested by our officers … such as in the case of gang activity.”
Deputy Chief Robert Vasquez says the department used to keep detailed statistics on gun crime but doesn’t anymore because its resources are stretched thin.
“Our crime analyst, that was her primary responsibility when she was hired on a few years ago,” Vasquez said. “But since then, we’ve been limited with resources. So her position — even though she’s a crime analyst, she’s been tasked with filling a lot of administrative duties within the police department.
“We’re trying to identify solutions to address both responsibilities: fulfilling administrative duties and refocusing our efforts on crime analysis,” he added.
The department does submit basic weapons-related data to the FBI as part of its monthly crime reports.
In those reports, the department tells the FBI how many robberies, homicides or assaults were committed with a firearm, as well as how many people were arrested on suspicion of unlawfully carrying or possessing guns.
Still, those reports don’t get into more detailed information that could point to trends, such as which parts of town are seeing the highest levels of gun crime or the ages of gun users. For the most part, police say, those trends are spotted by boots on the ground and passed along from officer to officer.
While comprehensive data is hard to come by, police do investigate guns. Serial numbers of guns are routinely run through the National Crime Information Center to check whether they are stolen, Vasquez said, and weapons often are sent to the state crime lab for further analysis.
And, when police investigate individuals or groups, guns are often a part of that investigation.
For example, criminal investigators looking into a trend of youth violence in Santa Fe have spent time learning where young people involved in crimes got their guns. Often Vasquez said, teens and young adults buy guns from other people inside the same network.
But the department doesn’t collect data every time an officer encounters a gun, Vazquez said. He’d like to see the department collect and analyze more detailed data on gun use and other crime-related statistics. To do that, he said, it would likely need more staff.
“I’m a firm believer in collecting information,” Vasquez said. “… If we did have a sworn [officer] or a civilian representative to focus strictly on crime analysis, and solely on that, that would really provide us additional information to really target lower crime and crime trends in our city.”
Miranda Viscoli, co-president of the nonprofit anti-gun advocacy group New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, said better collection and analysis of gun data is an important component of improving public safety and informing policy statewide.
“I think anybody tracking gun crime is always good, especially the police on the front lines of it,” said Viscoli, whose organization pushes for tougher gun laws.
Gun data is crucial to policymaking, Viscoli said. Her organization, in large part, relies on gun death data from the New Mexico Department of Health.
“That’s really important information for us to have, especially when we’re looking at what gun laws to pass that would be the most effective in New Mexico,” she said. “For instance, if the majority of deaths are from handguns, and we also have a high suicide rate, it would be logical for us to pass a bill that would say, ‘Hey — let’s do a 10-day hold on the sale of handguns.’ ”
In 2016, the Department of Health reported, guns were the third-leading cause of death in New Mexico, after poisoning and traffic deaths. That year, the department said, New Mexico’s rate of death-by-firearm was the eighth highest in the country and was 51 percent higher than the average for the U.S.
Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber said there are a number of challenges when it comes to tracking gun data and creating regulatory policies. Gun groups like the National Rifle Association have stifled national attempts to study gun data, he said, and in New Mexico, the state constitution bars local governments from enacting more stringent gun safety laws than the state as a whole.
When it comes to gun crime in Santa Fe, Webber said he’s learned from police administrators that the department is “not tracking guns as much as we’re tracking individuals who use guns.”
Still, he said, “in every category, more data is better than less data.”
“It may well be that we’re more likely, as Chief [Andrew] Padilla said, more likely to get a handle on it by tracking individuals who use guns in the commission of crimes in the police department,” Webber said. “But as a society, we need to be aware of where the guns are and under what circumstances they’ve been purchased, and are they in the hands of someone who has a restraining order against them and those kinds of issues.”
Champlin said he doesn’t see any cut-and-dry answers for preventing gun-related crimes. Like Vasquez and Viscoli, he thinks analyzing historical gun data could help point to any trends in crime that the department should be aware of.
In addition to facing what seems to be an uptick in gun crimes, Champlin pointed out that police also are facing an officer shortage as many depart for other agencies, like the Albuquerque Police Department, which recently rolled out a series of aggressive incentives for lateral officers.
The shortage means Santa Fe has fewer officers to respond to situations that could turn deadly fast.
“You have officers that are responding to these types of calls, and they’re doing it short-staffed, they’re doing it with less people,” Champlin said. “So, the concern is that they’re definitely put in harm’s way more often.”