IRS ADMITS ERRORS; LAS CRUCES ADMITS NOTHING

Framed on my study wall is likely a one-of-a-kind letter.  It is from the Taxpayer Advocate, Internal Revenue Service.  His predecessor screwed up big-time, my Senator Chuck Robb raised hell, and the IRS apologized in detail.  Notably, it asked me to draft its apology, modified it, but left it faithful to my draft and satisfactory.  Ironically, after I received it, I learned that the local IRS office had misadvised me about owing social security taxes for my once-a-week housecleaner.  I recovered all payments for taxes, penalties, and interest; and received interest on those funds (duly reported!).  It reads:

This letter is in response to your complaint about a letter dated January 10, 1997, which was sent to you from Lee Monks, the former Taxpayer Advocate.  You have stated that it has taken you well over two years to resolve this situation to your satisfaction.  I apologize for the delay in responding to your complaint and hope this letter is evidence that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is constantly striving to improve service to our customers.

A member of my staff reviewed the facts of your case and confirmed you had voluntarily filed six prior year returns and paid by year all taxes you believed were owed.  However, the IRS did not apply the returns and payments correctly.  I regret this office did not provide better assistance in rectifying the situation initially, as requested by, and promised, to you and your Congressman.

Mr. Monks’ letter referred to a review of your income tax returns as a basis for a determination that you had not paid all your taxes.  We agree that your tax returns show only tax obligations and cannot be used to verify the actual amount of tax you paid with each return.

Mr. Monks’ letter contradicted your prior claim that you had paid taxes for the June 1993 quarter.  Upon review, we determined that you had paid the taxes for that quarter.  As noted, you paid by a single check to satisfy the tax liability for the Forms 942 filed for that year.  Our office should have asked you to provide us with a copy of the cancelled check to support your claim.  The January 10, 1997, letter states that you admitted not making a payment for the June, 1993 taxes.  You deny making such an admission, and our review did not establish such an admission.

Mr. Monks’ letter further states that you could have gone to a local office for computations of penalties and interest due prior to filing the returns and paying the taxes due.  If you had, such computations would have neither prevented nor corrected the Service Center’s errors made by the misapplication of the payments to your accounts.  We agree that this remark, made four months after you had filed and paid, could not serve any constructive purpose.

In my efforts to improve service to taxpayers, I will do my best to improve the communications sent to taxpayers and thereby to prevent a response like the one your [sic] received.  Should you need anything further, please contact me at [number] or [name & title] at [number.]

This IRS apology is a touchstone for judging two draft apologies, one (8 Dec) which City Manager Ifo Pili requested from me and one (20 Jan) which I invited from him.   For between them, his email (17 Dec) indicated “some concerns” but assured me “we can come to an agreement on language that would be appropriate for me and satisfactory for you.”  In our 6 Jan conversation, I repeated my standard which I had stated at a 3 Dec conference, with Councilor Johana Bencomo and columnist Peter Goodman attending by Zoom: a meaningful apology had to specify the facts warranting the apology.

My draft is long because it covers many specifics, all previously reported in my blogs.  It reads:

We are writing to apologize for the unsatisfactory experience which you have had with the Las Cruces Police Department since the summer of 2019 in receiving, and after complaining about, fact-free, false, or fabricated allegations of municipal code violations.  After hearing about your case in our 3 December 2020 meeting and reviewing relevant documents afterwards, we believe that we have much to admit, regret, and reform to right the wrongs of LCPD conduct.  The sincerity of our apology will appear in our efforts to improve the LCPD in light of what we have learned from your case.  In response, we are making changes in policies and practices, and dealing with individuals appropriately.

Officer Valles was derelict in his duties.  He failed to conduct an investigation to ascertain the facts and, in the absence of proof or evidence of violations, should never have alleged them.  He failed to confirm the two items in the anonymous complaint and failed to check LCPD records for your pets’ licenses, shots, and permits.

IA Officer Lazarin was, as you told her and she admitted, unethical in not informing you that she was recording her interview of you.

Outreach Officer Daines was insulting in accusing you of being uncooperative simply because you refused oral instead of written communication.

IA Chief Rebecca Kinney lied that the requests for meetings by Chief Gallagher, Codes Enforcement Chief Chavez, and Daines were to ask whether you had additional complaints.

IA Sergeant Sean Mullens improperly made an additional complaint in your name without your permission and, as it turned out, contrary to your ethical and religious principles.

Chief Gallagher maligned you by wrongly claiming that you maligned Valles for fabricating three violations and lied to you by falsely claiming that those violations were part of the anonymous callers’ complaint.

Chavez, Mullens, and Kinney withheld from you the finding that Valles’s allegations were, as you complained, fact-free, false, or fabricated.  Chavez implied the truth and Mullens stated it in internal documents, but Kinney omitted this finding from her letter closing out the case.  Gallagher also withheld this finding from you.

LCPD management at all levels failed you.  It failed to explain IA procedures at the start of your case, to offer a projected schedule, to give progress reports, to provide a single point of contact, and to coordinate actions among divisions.

LCPD officers at no point were respectful of you.  Their delays, mixed messages, and random interventions frustrated and confused you.  Yet they refused to respect your request to communicate except in writing, and they wrongly blamed you for being uncooperative and delaying the investigation.

We apologize for and regret LCPD failures and their effects on you.  At the same time, we appreciate your persistence in pursuing your complaint because we can use your detailed criticisms to improve police performance.  We agree with you that LCPD policy and practice should emphasize basic goals of safety, security, and service, and ensure that contacts with citizens are constructive, not confrontational.

Pili’s draft lacks any complaint- or LCPD-conduct-related specifics and is long only in its distorted representations, evasive generalities, and bland assurances approved by the City Attorney.  An uninformed reader would think that my complaint was about poor interactions, poor communications, and my presumably hurt feelings.  It reads:

I am in receipt of your correspondence regarding your interactions with the City of Las Cruces. Over the past year and a half, you have met and talked with various City officials on several occasions to voice your frustrations and concerns regarding City Codes Enforcement and some members of LCPD. Thank you for sharing your perspective, it has led to positive change and needed review of processes and customer service. It is the continued mission of the City to provide high-level customer service and to address citizen concerns timely and efficiently. In that regard, we failed.

Your situation began in the summer of 2019 and you have not yet received closure to your original complaint. I apologize that this situation has taken so much time. You have alleged that LCPD officers were not respectful to you and that you were frustrated and confused by the information, or lack of information, provided. It is imperative that all city employees are always respectful and professional, even when issuing simple warnings, as in your case. Your concerns and complaints have been shared with those involved and expectations regarding professional behavior have been clearly communicated. In addition, LCPD changed the document that was used for issuing warnings. As you indicated, the form was confusing and unclear, and it was your complaint that led to this change. In addition, we have reviewed specific interactions in your complaints and have identified areas of needed improvement, including more timely responses and improved communication.

I apologize that your experience has been frustrating and confusing. Thank you for voicing your concerns.

The difference between the two drafts can be explained in several ways.  One is the difference in support of my complaints, from my elected representatives.  In Virginia, I had the support of my U.S. Senator; in Las Cruces, I had support from not one Councilor.

Another is that between an honest apology and a pretended apology for PR purposes.  Pili’s offer of an apology to me in a 3 December meeting seemed a show for Bencomo and Goodman, who were favorably impressed.  Indeed, as I pushed Pili on specifics, Goodman interrupted me to say that he thought that Pili had offered me what I was still seeking.  I knew better, and, since I had kept him informed, Goodman should have.  The result was a draft which Pili knew was unacceptable, an act of insincerity meant to end the matter.  Apparently, it has.  He has long since failed to report to me on other matters which he had promised to address, including my request about expunging relevant police records and, if not, informing me about what is retained, where located, and by whom kept.

The message is clear.  Las Cruces officials, elected or employed, are too small to admit mistakes, rectify their consequences, and make reforms.  Their efforts go into concealing them, even excusing city lawyers who violate disclosure laws for the fun of frustrating citizens, lie to state officials, and subvert an apology.  So all their talk of transparency and accountability, both requiring truthfulness, is nothing more than talk—a cool aid with mellowing, sedating, hallucinogenic effects letting imbibers perceive words to define reality or actualize promises, as Goodman eagerly expected of Pili’s words.  In Las Cruces, officials live by dishonesty or denial because they make time-serving easier, citizens live in distrust and disregard because it has always been this way, and the media look away. 

YVETTE HERRELL GIVES NM DISTRICT 2 AN EARLY WARNING

With the support of the oil and gas industry, Yvette Herrell has shown herself to be both oily and gassy.  Like others with the interests of party or its supporters to advance or protect, she has violated her oath of office in the earliest days of the 117^th Congress.  That violation is an early warning of her political inclinations—to overturn democracy.

The Constitution gives states, not Congress, exclusive authority over their elections.   Yet Herrell accepted repeated falsehoods about Pennsylvania’s election procedures and ballot counting, and the resulting disenfranchisement of New Mexican voters.  To explain her position, she would sully the truth because Pennsylvania law and New Mexico facts are against her.  To defend it, she would invoke her loyalty to a president despite his being impeached for a second time, wanting to remain in power, and seeking to wield it without restraint.  Her vote to reject Pennsylvania’s election results violates her oath.

Two down-to-earth questions for Herrell are how does she know that claims of voting irregularities in Pennsylvania are true and substantial; and how does she, a recently elected, first-term representative from New Mexico know more than Pat Toomey, a three-term representative and two-term senator for Pennsylvania?  And then there is the judge. 

U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport [PA] turned down the request for an injunction by Trump’s campaign.  In his ruling, Brann said the Trump campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence.  In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. ... Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, the [sic] Republican from Pennsylvania, recognized the decision and called on Trump to “accept the outcome of the election. ... With today’s decision by Judge Matthew Brann, a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist, to dismiss the Trump campaign’s lawsuit, President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania. …” (AP, 21 Nov)

Case closed.  Yet Herrell defies the knowledge and judgment of a conservative Republican judge well qualified and positioned to know the law and the facts.  She displays not only arrogance and ignorance undesirable in any elected official, but also reflexive complicity with or obedience to Republican radicals, some Congressional colleagues, meaning to overthrow a free and fair election, and establish an apartheid autocracy in America.

We need to understand that Herrell’s early voting has given us an early, though no doubt unintended, warning.  It warns us that she is an elected official who cannot be trusted to act on facts and logic as the basis of truth and serve public interests.  It warns us that she is a tool serving the interests of her party and its financial supporters.  We in New Mexico’s Second District must not ignore this early warning as government agencies ignored early warnings before 9/11 and 1/6.  We had better pay close and continuous attention to Herrell; we had better publicize, criticize, and condemn her efforts which disregard New Mexico’s interests and betray America’s constitutional democracy.

THE SECOND AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

 [Note: I do not reprint this column from nearly 8 years ago to say "I told you so."  I reprint it because I want it to suggest that what transpired on 6 January 2021 was, except for its cinemagraphic details about troop engagements, etc., entirely predictable from the trajectory of Republican ideological reassertion of its inherent core values.  The Obama presidency acted as a catalyst triggering latent Republican allegiance to inequality, mainly in racism, and antipathy to democracy, with its core value of political equality of all people.  The moral of this story is that Trumpism is just the label given to the more recent and recognizable reassertion of modern Republicanism--which means that it will not abate after Trump without concerted efforts to persuade his followers that democracy is better for them as well as for other Americans.]

13-02-16

The Second American Civil War (2)

[NOTE: The paranoids are making me paranoid.  Aware of, if not alarmed by, this development, I think that the best therapy is an exercise in "creative writing."  However, rather than offer narrative, not my forte, I offer the conceptual overview and underlying themes which I hope can prompt truly creative people to develop plot and characters.  Dr. Strangelove meet Wayne LaPierre.  I shall gladly sign over any and all rights to movies or books which my seminal ideas may prompt!  I am inclined to think that an coordinated civil war is less likely than random terrorist acts.  But a scenario may be worth a moment's amused consideration.

Perhaps what is most worrisome is the Republican inability to adjust to the reality of Obama's re-election.  My theory du jour is that Republicans did not believe that McCain, unloved as he was by them, would lose to a black man and junior senator in his first term.  Under the scorched-earth leadership of Mitch McConnell, Republicans then attempted to make Obama an aberration, as if the tide of demography could be turned by one black man's defeat.  So they did not believe that Romney, unloved as he was by them, would lose to a black man whom they had tried to demonize in every way possible.  By believing their own fictions of success, they set themselves for failure.  Now they are in stunned disbelief that Obama is no aberration and that the tide has turned, but still against them.  Having lived by a Southern strategy and all the bigotry and ignorance underlying it, they are now dying by it.  Good riddance to those--McConnell, Boehner, McCain, Graham, Cantor, Inhofe, Cruz, prominent among many others--who have neither decency nor integrity, and are willing to cripple a country which they cannot control.]

With various elected Republican officials calling for periodic bloodshed every century or so, “Second Amendment remedies,” or a “second American Revolution,” I thought that I would fantasize or forecast something a little different: a Second American Civil War.  I understand the Republican desire to align such hostilities with the American Revolution; it purports that the party’s rebellious impulses are patriotic, not traitorous, and supports its paranoid delusions about a “tyrannical government.”  Washington, with Obama as president, is like London, with George III as king.  Thus, they talk.

But the real parallel is the treasonous rebellion of Confederate pro-slavery states against democratic states of different political positions—South versus North—on basic questions of America’s political unity, the precedence of Constitutional and federal law, and the Creator’s grant of equality to all men.  However, the Second American Civil War will be fought less along geographic than socio-economic lines: country versus city; and less between armies and navies from two different regions than loyal and disloyal units of the three main Military Services supported by paramilitary units of the National Republican Army (NRA), with civilians drawn in as war comes to their neighborhoods. 

A parallel is the Yugoslav Wars, which involved conflicts between military units of the provinces of Yugoslavia as that country disintegrated.  These territorial battles between provinces also degenerated into ethnic and religious conflicts on a smaller scale by paramilitary units and free-lance groups.  In their effort to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia and their dominance within it, Serbs from rural areas attacked, raped, tortured, and killed residents of mixed-population urban areas.  The Yugoslav Wars gave rise to a new coinage, “ethnic cleanings,” which referred to violent assaults on non-Serbs and which resemble, in toned-down form, the Republican idea and implementation of Hispanic “self-deportation.”

A novelist is better prepared than I to represent the possible, perhaps the plausible, contours which such a civil war would take in 21^st-century America.  My imagination is insufficient to specify the events prompting the alliance of military and paramilitary units, and the outbreak of hostilities.  But the Right’s increasing volatility and violence of language and its growing incivility and hostility to the Left are preparing the emotional, mental, cultural, and social conditions for physical mayhem.  Despite the mindless efforts of the media and the mendacious exertions of Fox News, the asymmetry of abuse is clear: the Right is increasingly extreme in word and deed.

The forces for a second revolution are already in place in the “red” states, in which talk about “tyrannical government” is particularly vivid, vociferous, and violent.  The volunteers who constitute the majority of officers and enlisted personnel of the Military Services are disproportionately from or stationed in the “red” states of the South and the southern Great Plains.  Most of the country’s largest forts are located in these former states of the Confederacy or states adjacent to them like Kentucky and Oklahoma.  Practices advancing evangelical Christianity at the military service academies, with distinct anti-Semitic tendencies, imply that America’s officers support neo-conservative politics and policies which fuel statements of states rights, nullification, interposition, or succession—the doctrines which rationalized the racism of rebels in the first civil war and which Republican officials articulate today without rebuke from within their party.

Other loosely associated paramilitary groups constitute a National Republican Army, which includes many former military personnel, which prevails in the “red” states, and which is doing everything it can to grow in numbers and arms.  The spread of military-style weapons to these active groups bodes ill for domestic peace and tranquility.  Their rallying cry is, of course, the Second Amendment, and the cause of its rallying is its fear and loathing of President Obama.  But it will not diminish its activities once he leaves office.  Its anti-Democratic, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-socialist, anti-communist, anti-fascist—these first six “anti’s” applied interchangeably—, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, anti-minority, anti-GLBT, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and other forms of “anti-ness” will not dissipate when Obama leaves offices or even with the (unlikely) election of a Tea-Party-friendly Republican president.  They are indelibly etched into the NRA’s culture.

Two facts suggest an affinity between military and paramilitary organizations in this country.  One, they share a love of arms.  America’s defense budget is greater than the combined defense budgets of all other countries.  And Americans own more guns per capita than the people in any other country.  Two, they share some of the same arms.  America is one of the very few countries which allow civilians to own and operate military-style arms.  Given the NRA’s fear that the Obama administration intends to confiscate guns—its evidence is the fact that the administration has indicated nothing of the sort—it is a short step from a fear of losing them to the effort to use them.

The ascendency of the Right to control of the Senate and the presidency would mark the demise of democracy in America.  It is occurring in state governments controlled by Republicans since the 2010 elections.  With thirty-seven state governments in Republican control, the Right can, if it coordinates its efforts, call for a Constitutional convention and can, if it adds only one more state, can approve a radically amended or new Constitution, perhaps as drafted by ALEC.  Fortunately, for the Right, the Left is clueless or complacent about this possibility.

Given their monopoly of power in so many state parties, the Right no longer respects election results, popular opinion, common sense, and truth at any level of government.  For example, no sooner did Michigan voters reject a proposed state constitutional amendment allowing governor-appointed city managers than the lame-duck legislature passed and the governor signed a measure restoring that power in a law which cannot be amended for 2 years.  In place of, and in defiance of, the inconvenience of voters’ wishes or established facts, Republicans respond with, and act on, fabrications and falsehoods on issues with implications not to their liking—examples: recession-fighting stimulus spending and human-influenced global warming.  They use contra-factual or fact-free propaganda to justify unpopular or repressive legislation or administrative rulings.  To oppose abortion on grounds of rape, they claim that female physiology ensures conception-free rape.  To oppose the “consent of the governed,” they claim voter fraud as spurious grounds for efforts to discourage or prevent voting not only by minorities, students and the poor, but also by seniors, who are even less likely to be involved in voting irregularities of any kind.

The controversy about illegal immigrants is part and parcel of the Republican effort to debilitate democracy.  Eleven million Hispanic immigrants have lived and worked in this country for years, even decades, and contributed to the economy.  Only as the political implications of a changing demography have come to the fore, and only as xenophobia has driven them to offend these small-time malefactors, have Republicans made the issue of illegal immigration an important one.  In line with their anti-democratic proclivities and despite their phony outrage at the idea of “class warfare,” Republicans in the House of Representatives prefer a solution which would create a second class of residents by denying citizenship to these Hispanic immigrants while taxing them without representation.

So, too, the Republican initiatives to infringe upon the Constitutionally sanctioned right to abortion.  Totalitarian states make control of sex and reproduction central to control of citizens.  George Orwell’s novel 1984 featured the state “anti-sex league.”  But his fiction was not stranger than historical fact.  Nazi Germany anticipated his novel in its state engineering of reproduction of a “master race,” its incarceration of homosexuals, and its research and practice of eugenics generally.  Communist China has adopted and enforced a one-child-per-family policy.  In this totalitarian vein, Republican are enacting or proposing legislation to limit or deny opportunities to women to exercise their right to an abortion; to require doctors to lie or misinform their patients; and to require them to perform unnecessary, intrusive, and thus abusive medical procedures.  (Since most, though a diminishing number of, doctors are Republicans, they and their AMA do not, on basis of medical ethics and the integrity of the patient-doctor relationship, oppose such legislation—which exposes their lack of ethics and integrity.)  These Republican efforts accord with totalitarian impulses and give the lie, a really Big Lie, to Republican claims to promote freedom and personal responsibility, which, by definition, implies the freedom to choose for oneself.

What the Second American Civil War comes down to is a war, not about slavery or states rights, but about democracy and its first and fundamental belief that “all men are created equal.”  Republicans no longer accept this American belief, and their words and deeds contrary to it are moving them to discredit and ruin democratic institutions now and, if they believe it necessary, to rebel against democratic government later.  With the fraud of fabrications and falsehoods preparing for the force of arms, Republicans are turning against America and its democracy.

Are there a producer and a screenwriter out there daring enough to make a film about this Second American Civil War or do they fear boycotts, bullets, and bombs?

LAS CRUCES LAW OFFICE PLAYS GAMES AND LOSES, AND AN UPDATE

[NOTE: I am not going to make a promise because I am not considering a run for office (though, were I elected at 81, I might be a “first” something or other).  But I am probably at or near the end of my blogs on police reform related to my case.  I have done as much as it is possible for one citizen to do to that imperative objective.  If one blog remains, it deals with a matter under negotiation between the City Manager (with the City Attorney looking over his shoulder) and me.  That statement leaves me free to write blogs on police reform not related to my case.

I want to make one point about the way in which the Las Cruces Police Department in my case (and, no doubt most, if not all, others) and the Law Office conduct or contract investigations: to develop one side of two sides of the story.  The LCPD seeks only to confirm an accusation against a citizen or to exonerate itself of a complaint.  The Law Office seeks to condemn its suspects whether criminal offenses are discovered or not.  Neither display an interest in ascertaining the facts, much less the truth, by a fair, balanced, and impartial proceeding.  The City pays for the abuse of such investigations.]

                                                                                                                                                                                            

In my 6 January blog, I declared that I was not bluffing about going to court to have the Law Office release four documents in response to my IPRA request.  Because it refused to identify author, audience, topic, and date of two withheld documents, I inferred that they were sent outside the chain of command, probably to the Mayor.

I already had the law on my side.  Last spring, City Attorney Jennifer Vega-Brown, through her senior assistant Robert Cabello, had claimed an exemption from IPRA on the grounds that the redacted portions of two documents and the entirety of two withheld documents contained protected discussions of opinion and the officer’s employment relationship with the City.  I filed a complaint with the New Mexico Office of the Attorney General, the Law Office restated its claim, I rebutted it, and, on 2 December, the NMOAG found it likely that the Law Office had not complied with the law.

On 7 January, I received all four documents—I trust them to be the real thing—in their entirety and without redaction.  They surprised me.  First, none of them contains anything which matches the reasons claimed for their exemption.  Second, none of them left the chain of command.  My suspicion based on the inference that refusing disclosure of their distribution concealed an impropriety was wrong.  Nothing went to the Mayor.

If I am right, the Law Office’s withholding all but 18 records, then all but 5, then all but 4 and some basic data was a game played with lies for no purpose other than to tease and frustrate a citizen critical of LCPD conduct.  I played because I knew that I would win and believed that I would expose Law Office mendacity.  I did win but exposed instead its trifling with the law and squandering public resources.  They include the taxpayers’ money spent on the time and energy not only of City employees Vega-Brown and Cabello, but also of at least three lawyers in the NMOAG.

I have sent these documents to my NMOAG point of contact for consideration.  I doubt that he will be pleased by the conduct of these officers of the court.  I do not know whether he will take any action or, if he does, what it will be.  But I believe that the City Manager and perhaps Council should take a McHard look at Vega-Brown and ask her whether she thinks that fun-and-games with a citizen’s IPRA request is an appropriate way for her to conduct herself as an employee and representative of Las Cruces.

LAS CRUCES GOVERNMENT SHIELDS POLICE MISCONDUCT

This “law-and-order” guy believes that no law enforcement department or agency is above criticism for bad polices, practices, or conduct.  If ignorance, indifference, denial, or defiance are indications, authorities in Las Cruces—City Council, Police Department, and Law Office—disagree.  But, then, I am a Type-A soul in a Type-B society.

I had no idea that exposing professional deficiencies in the LCPD because of an officer’s false, fact-free, or fabricated allegations of minor code violations would expose political deficiencies in Council and legal deficiencies in the Law Office.  I expected LCPD resentment but not Council inaction or Law Office obstruction; after all, public safety is a primary government function.  I certainly did not expect Mayor Miyagishima’s insulting rebuke of Councilor Bencomo that she might make “false” criticisms of the LCPD.

No Councilor has used information about LCPD misconduct detailed in my blogs since August 2019 to question an LCPD officer when the opportunity arose.  In a June working session on Eight Can’t Wait proposals, Deputy Police Chief Dominguez said that many people distrust the LCPD—no Councilor asked why—and that the LCPD admits its mistakes—no Councilor asked for an instance, not necessarily mine.  When I wrote him about my case in view of these statements, he did not reply.  When I made an IPRA request for case-related documents, the Law Office, headed by City Attorney Vega-Brown, released innocuous ones and redacted or withheld four sensitive ones.  When a citizen wrote the Mayor and Councilors to urge that they address my case and right LCPD wrongs, not one responded.

Council, instead of admitting and addressing government mistakes, considers only concerns, issues, and problems to avoid personal accountability.  It sets the example of stonewalling citizens with complaints about police conduct; the LCPD and the Law Office follow it.  This stonewalling reinforces the Law Office’s combative risk-management approach to citizens’ cases or complaints.  Its responses to my IPRA request for complaint-related documents seem intended to protect Council and the LCPD from embarrassment or worse.

Item one: The LCPD suppressed confirmation of my complaint about those faulty allegations in two redacted documents, both internal memorandums to Police Chief Gallagher.  IA Sgt. Mullen’s 5 February states, “Mr. Hays’ warning notice had several violations marked to which there was no physical evidence or proof an actual violation had occurred.”  But IA Lt. Kinney’s 19 February letter closing my complaint omits this finding; the LCPD refused to admit that it was wrong and I was right.  (Take note, Chief Dominguez.)

Item two, a speculation: The Law Office withholds two documents with distribution so sensitive that it refuses even to identify writers, recipients, topics, or dates—information not exempted from IPRA.  A likely recipient, someone outside the chain of command for concurrence with LCPD’s responses to my complaint, is the Mayor.

This cover-up may be worse than the crime.  I complained about the Law Office’s IPRA violations to the New Mexico Office of the Attorney General.  After its investigation, the NMOAG emailed a 2 December six-page legal opinion, with a two-paragraph conclusion:

Because we have remaining concerns about the City’s responses to Mr. Hays’ requests dated March 5, 2020 and April 9, 2020, we strongly recommend that it reconsider both requests so as to ensure that it has fully complied with IPRA [emphasis added]. The City should again scrutinize the two records it withheld and the two records it redacted. Most importantly, these records should only be redacted (or withheld) to the limited extent they contain matters of opinion, as we have previously explained. And, after conducting this review, if the City maintains that it has properly withheld those two records in their entirety, it should reevaluate whether they may be redacted so as to provide Mr. Hays with the records’ “date, topic, author, and audience.” If this is not possible, the City could, in the interest of transparency, nevertheless provide the requested information to Mr. Hays notwithstanding the fact that it is not legally obligated to do so. 

For your reference, a copy of the IPRA Guide is available on the website of the Office of the Attorney General www.nmag.gov [emphasis added]. If you have any questions regarding this determination or IPRA in general, please let me know. 

That is, start over and get smart.  Clearly, the Law Office displayed either incompetence in not comprehending the law or contempt in defying it—and represented Las Cruces government not even up to its usual level of mediocrity.

The Law Office has neither reconsidered the NMOAG opinion nor replied to my 21 December letter of inquiry about its intentions: compliance or court.  I expected its discourtesy and confrontation in its belief that I am bluffing.  I am not.  I have a strong case made stronger by a strong NMOAG opinion.  The Law Office runs big risks of an unfavorable decision, expensive penalties, and the very disclosures which it wants to prevent.  The Mayor and Councilors, the Police Chief, and the City Attorney may prefer pay-outs for incompetence and dishonesty to reforms of police and law operations.  If so, their pieties about reforms serve as a PR front comforting others who also talk reform and also do not take it seriously.  Meanwhile, I shall keep calm and carry on.