Mayor, chief say no crisis in staffing for police

Department is launching new recruiting efforts

Santa Fe police Chief Andrew Padilla and Mayor Alan Webber offered incremental measures Friday in response to a report critical of the department’s recruitment program, saying the department was already moving in the right direction.

The National Police Foundation report, made public Thursday, said the Santa Fe Police Department “is having immense difficulty filling open positions” due to a lack of qualified recruits, a limited recruiting strategy and competition from higher-paying agencies like the Albuquerque Police Department. Santa Fe currently has 142 sworn officers and 31 vacant positions.

“I don’t think we have a crisis at the moment,” the mayor said. “I think what we have is a steady need to do a better job.”

The wide-ranging “staffing needs assessment” report, which took months to complete at a cost of about $60,000, did not make a specific recommendation about how many officers Santa Fe should have on its police force. It did note a 2011 University of New Mexico study that concluded the city’s growth after a series of annexations requires a

total of 192 sworn officers.

Neither the police chief nor the mayor on Friday would specify the number of officers they believe is appropriate.

“There really is no one single way to create the right number of police officers, for any community,” Webber said. “You don’t just take the number of residents and divide by a factor and that tells you the correct staffing levels. It’s a very complicated assessment that involves service calls, kinds of calls, a whole set of dynamics. We did not have that [calculation] built into this contract. If we want to do that, they can do it, but it’s more money, more time, a deeper and different assessment.”

Councilor Chris Rivera, who chairs the city’s Public Safety Committee, expressed surprise when asked about the staffing level issue Friday by The New Mexican.

“I thought the study was supposed to be about the size of the department,” to include appropriate numbers of patrol officers, detectives and other categories, Rivera said. Rivera acknowledged in a phone interview that he had not yet finished reading the report and was going by an account published in Friday’s edition of The New Mexican.

“We’ve always had vacancies in the police department, and we’ve always known of recruiting problems,” Rivera said in response to the report. “It’s disappointing, because I don’t think it’s what we initially asked for.”

One of the study’s authors is expected to make a presentation to the City Council on Wednesday.

Webber was noncommittal on whether the city would undertake an additional assessment. “It’s less important to me at the moment what the right number is than that we get more people in the ranks right now,” he said.

The mayor did tout the hiring of 27 new officers in 2018, which he said showed an increased interest by “a lot of officers who want to work for the Santa Fe Police Department.” However, the department lost 38 officers the same year.

“That is a direct reflection of the Albuquerque recruitment efforts to pay people more,” he said.

Webber also cited numbers from the police department but not in the report that he said showed a consistent vacancy rate of between 10 percent and 15 percent in the department from 2009-18.

“If there is a sense that we are suddenly doing something dramatically wrong, or that we are not attracting officers, the data … really don’t substantiate that,” he said. “What the data tell me is that we need to do a much better job retaining and developing the officers that we already have.”

The mayor asserted that “the first step to doing that is a step that we’ve already taken” — increases in officer pay in the city budget approved in July that focused “intentionally” on newer officers but included across-the-board raises.

“We’re a very young police department,” Webber said. “We need to keep those young people so they feel like they’re valued and their opportunities are here in Santa Fe.”

In further response to the recruitment concerns, the police chief said the department would focus on promoting its website, sfpdonline.com, and its social media accounts, and would hire an additional recruiting officer, bringing the total number of such officers to two. He also noted that new negotiations with the police union — in which higher pay and benefits are likely to be central issues — would begin “in the next few months.”

“We have to look at what the city’s finances look like,” Webber said, when asked about his goal for the negotiations. “We’re going to be seriously motivated to continue to build the trusting relationship with the police that we’ve started.”

The department had already been planning to reopen a Police Explorer program to encourage Boy Scouts and junior high and high school students to apply down the road, Padilla said. The department also is hiring six safety aides for three-year unsworn positions assisting patrol officers, he said, after which they would be encouraged to apply to become cadets. The department may hire additional civilian crime scene technicians to allow the two officers who do that work to go back to patrol.

Padilla said the department also is purchasing bumper stickers for patrol vehicles with the invitation “Join Our Team,” and officers are handing out recruitment cards to members of the public.

The report was strongly critical of the department’s efforts to recruit new officers and keep experienced ones, saying it led to a situation where fewer officers have to handle more calls for service and detectives take on greater caseloads, as well as inhibited the department’s ability to do proactive police work and engage more with residents. However, the report did praise the department as a progressive police agency with good training and equipment, and a positive relationship with the community.

“That revolving door of officers, that revolving door of commanders, of chiefs of police, we hope is over,” said Padilla, in response to another critique in the report.

“I’m in it for the long haul,” Padilla said. “I live and breathe police work. I’m committed to this job 24/7. It doesn’t matter where our officers live, work or play, they’re committed to this career. It’s not a job, they’re not just clocking in, clocking out. They truly care.”

Padilla also announced a command staff reorganization that will move operations Deputy Chief Ben Valdez to deputy chief of administration — which includes oversight of recruitment — a post vacated last month by the retirement of Robert Vazquez. Paul Joye, the captain in charge of criminal investigations, will become deputy chief of operations; patrol Capt. Anthony Tapia will take over investigations; and Lt. Matthew Champlin will become patrol captain.