In considering police behavior and police reform, I was surprised to learn—I should have known—that City Council plays virtually no role, and that an indirect one, in determining the policies and practices of the Las Cruces Police Department. The implications of this discovery bear on the discussion about a civilian review board.
City Council hires and fires the City Manager. The City Manager has authority over the LCPD. The Police Chief, after consulting with LCPD officers, develops LCPD policies and practices for the City Manager’s approval and, with it, implements them. The LCPD website explains their development:
Standard Operating Procedures are methods to be followed routinely for the performance of designated operations or designated situation. The Las Cruces Police Department SOPs are referred to as General Orders. These general orders are compiled, adapted, and published by the Chief of Police’s authority with the City Manager’s approval and concurrence for information, guidance, government, discipline, and administration of the Las Cruces Police Department and its personnel.
The statement defines a privileged position for the LCPD. It precludes subordination to and oversight by elected officials. It implies that City Council and citizens have little or no influence on the development of LCPD policies and practices of policing. It implies that they have little or no way to indicate their approval of or opposition to them. It also implies that the LCPD chief and other police officers know what policies and practices best suit the citizens of Las Cruces and are solely qualified to judge officers’ compliance with them. However, officers may have interests in policies and practices not coinciding with the interests of citizens or with their evolving views about policing. The LCPD’s privileged position may not be in the public interest.
This gap between City Council and the LCPD leaves accountability and transparency entirely to the police department. The pretenses of this arrangement are that it involves no conflict of interest, that police can hold themselves accountable and be transparent, that Internal Affairs is a disinterested adjudicator of complaints, and that the police chief is an honest enforcer of policy and practice. LCPD’s record supports none of these pretenses. Moreover, the LCPD expects the public to trust it to do its job properly, but the public does not, regardless of whether the job is small or large.
Small are code violations. Buried in an internal IA report is a finding that an officer’s allegations of code violations lacked evidence or proof. Yet the IA report on a citizen’s complaint does not even mention the allegations. Dominguez, knowing both the policy against false reporting and the falsity of the allegations, upheld them. He refused enforcement to protect the LCPD against a more serious matter: bias-based policing (antisemitism in more than a few LCPD officers). Dominguez held no one accountable and was not transparent about his decision based on personal or political grounds.
Large is police murder. Dominguez tried to deceive the public with a biased PR film about the murder of Sra. Amelia Baca. He and other LCPD officers participated in the multi-agency task force investigation and the review of the report to the DA, thereby compromising the integrity of the investigation. He did not hold the LCPD officer involved accountable; indeed, he returned him to duty. No one knows why.
No members of City Council have addressed this gap between City Council and the LCPD. So talk by elected officials about accountability or transparency in police conduct is little more than political flatulence. Councilors and the City Manager, to their shame, support a police chief who is an interested and self-serving person, has demonstrated bias and dishonesty, yet initiates and implements department policy and practice, and bases his decisions on them as he deems advantageous.
Many citizens distrust the LCPD because it is neither accountable nor transparent. They fear its routine operations and resent funding its settlements for egregious actions by its officers, over neither of which it has any control. Members of City Council, fearful of the LCPD’s political power, avoid police reforms, tolerate low-quality policing, and approve high-cost settlements funded by taxpayers. They disregard citizens’ concerns for their safety by resisting a citizen review board because it would antagonize the LCPD. Yet such a board would provide a useful service to the public. It would enable citizens to state their concerns and share information in a public forum about policing, and develop proposals to Council for improved police policies and practices. It would close some of the gap between City Council and the LCPD.
The contracted police auditor has not provided such service. Council’s terms and conditions tightly circumscribed what and how it could operate. Its recent contracts with the police auditor, OIR, severely constrained its audit, and clearly disposed it to tell Council what it wanted to hear. In a flagrant instance, OIR’s representative testified that interactions between officers and citizens were excellent—a conclusion reached solely on the basis of police say-so, without any OIR contact with or input from citizens involved in those interactions. New terms and conditions are unlikely to restore Council’s or OIR’s credibility after years of unprofessional, Council-pleasing work.
Except for a media commentator or two, almost no one believes that a citizen review board is the only or the best means to achieve police reform and higher-quality policing. It is one of many possible means, all of which should be considered, to help improve policing. But it is, I believe, the only one which enables citizens to have a direct voice in influencing police policies and practices, and to take an important step to define LCPD’s proper role as a public servant, not a public threat.
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