CON: Act means we sue cops, don’t fight crime

It is no secret that New Mexico has many serious social problems — dangerously high crime rates, lack of education and high-paying jobs, drug and alcohol abuse, unemployment.

So why — in the face of these systemic problems that suck the lifeblood from the state — have certain legislators now decided one of our big problems is that it is too hard to sue police officers? House Speaker Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, and Sen. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, lawyers who make their livings from lawsuits, are sponsoring a bill that would make it easier for lawyers to sue law enforcement officers and collect huge fees for their efforts.

Their proposal would change the rules for constitutional claims that apply virtually everywhere else, even though New Mexicans whose constitutional rights are violated already can and have for decades sued governmental officials and agencies and have obtained millions of dollars in settlements and verdicts.

Now, apparently because of certain highly-charged events involving a handful of police officers in other states and violent protests in those states, certain “enlightened” lawmakers in New Mexico have decided it should be easier to sue and win a lawsuit against law enforcement officers here. Frankly, when New Mexicans are polled about their concerns, crime and education usually top the list. Police misconduct based on systemic racism — the rallying cry for defunding, reducing or eliminating police, or making it easier to sue police — rarely, if ever, appears on lists of New Mexico’s most widespread social problems.

In addition, one of our top 100 problems is not that attorneys make too little money. There is a reason why lawyers from other states flock to New Mexico, spending millions of dollars a year on billboards and television and internet ads. The influx of out-of-state personal injury attorneys is so great that one Albuquerque lawyer has begun advertising that he is local, contrasting himself with scores of other lawyers who take their money from New Mexico lawsuits back to their home state of Texas, to name one example. Even Cervantes associated with Texas lawyers in a Santa Fe lawsuit that resulted in a bizarre and outlandish $165 million verdict against Federal Express.

Out-of-state lawyers ply their trade in New Mexico for one of the same reasons we have lost doctors, employers and enterprising young people to other states — the ability to make a good living. Those lawyers don’t want to live here; they just sue here. Filing lawsuits against employers, health care workers and law enforcement officers in New Mexico is a very lucrative business. This is due in no small part to our Legislature and courts having enacted laws that make it much easier to sue and collect money here than in most other states, such as the civil rights law being proposed.

Egolf, Cervantes and others now seek to open the floodgates even wider by eliminating certain legal standards that apply across the country. Egolf was quoted as saying law enforcement officers who do the right thing will not need to worry about being sued. By “doing the right thing,” Egolf actually means if a police officer acts perfectly under stressful and volatile conditions, he or she might not be sued. You can be sure that in the real world, anything less than perfect will result in a lawsuit and a request for attorneys’ fees. Even if their client receives only one dollar, attorneys’ fees of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars can be awarded.

At a time when New Mexicans are concerned about being victims of crime and long waits for understaffed police to respond to calls, adding new ways to sue and recover money from law enforcement is counterproductive, unnecessary and selfish.