OIR (Oinks In Review) CONCLUDES THAT LCPD PIGS ARE KOSHER

The City Council Working Session (27 Feb) focused on OIR’s latest audit of the LCPD.  As is common consulting practice—“best practice” it is not—, OIR’s agent Teresa Magula gave the Mayor and the Councilors the favorable report on the LCPD which they wanted to hear and for which they paid many thousands of citizens' dollars.  As Karin Sanchez reports (KFOX14, 1 March) in “Independent auditor found Las Cruces police made changes following past audit,” Magula concluded,

 

“Overall your police department is extremely professional, patient and very commendable in their interactions with the public but as we know it only takes that one instance of officers acting in a manner that is less than professional to put this department in the headlines.”

 

City Council members had to have been pleased by this conclusion because it relieves the pressure for, in Councilor Bencomo’s ardent words, “real police reform” and the proposed Citizens’ Police Oversight Commission.

 

Before returning to the Magula’s presentation, I must say a word or two about Sanchez’s report.  First, she is one local reporter whose writing suggests a lack of facility in any primary language.  Second, like her colleagues elsewhere in the FOX news empire, she omits at least half the news.  Her article said not one word about citizen comments after Magula’s presentation, on OIR’s competency, the limitations of the contract and the audit, and—oh, by the way—police misconduct.  Not to be outdone, Justin Garcia’s more detailed 3 March Sun-News article also omitted any mention of citizen comments.  The autocratic reportorial policies of local media: taxation without representation.

 

The media mantra: bad news is not news.  Not one citizen who addressed City Council commended OIR or the LCPD; all criticized it.  No one spoke truth to these powers-that-be more powerfully than Bobbie Green, President of the local NAACP chapter, or Maria Flores, former chair of the Las Cruces Public Schools board.  Among Green’s pointed remarks was a question, which I paraphrase: how much training does it take to educate an officer not to shoot an old woman who does not understand English.  (The answer is more than 70 hours; Police Chief Miguel Dominguez expressed surprise at Officer Jared Gosper’s fatal shooting of Sra. Amelia Baca because the killer cop had had over 70 hours of de-escalation training.)  Green’s remarks prompted applause by most citizens but no officials or officers.  They may have led NMSU to terminate her employment the day afterwards for no stated cause, perhaps because of structural institutional hostility to outspoken critics, perhaps because of lobbying by resentful political or police personnel.

 

Several citizens commented that the OIR audit was, in effect, a fraud.  They noted that the LCPD selected the cases made available to OIR for review—the bias of selection by the interested party.  They noted that the cases reflected only police accounts of events—the bias of perspective: one side of two sides of the story.  They noted that OIR did not contact any of the citizens involved in the cases—the bias of omitted evidence.  Yet City Council has approved of OIR’s police audits despite these fatal flaws in three consecutive contracts.

 

Nevertheless, OIR agent Magula was unembarrassed to conclude that “interactions with the public” were “extremely professional, patience, and very commendable.”  With pleasing casual indifference to the facts, her conclusion reflects the abject prostitution of OIR’s self-proclaimed professionalism.  The price of OIR’s integrity in offering up this client-pleasing report was about $75,000.  City Council is now considering whether to continue to buy fulsome praise.  But, in view of strong criticism, they could fear that more public scrubbings will prompt more such public drubbings by citizens rightly outraged by a Mayor and six Councilors who are too politically weak, morally lost, and personally craven to make public safety and, with a nod to Bencomo, any kind of police reform a priority.

 

I must add, sadly because I have been a life-long feminist, that this all-female set of councilors, a first in Las Cruces, far from improving Las Cruces government, has only continued its mediocrity.  When it comes to public responsibilities, these Las Cruces women, led by Mayor Pro-Tem Kasandra Gandara, have offered nothing more or better than Las Cruces men, only a local instance of gender equality.