New Mexico is a state historically dominated by Democrats at state, county, and city levels. In my 19 years in Las Cruces, I, a left-leaning Independent, have watched them hold power and do little good. All of the people-centered domains—education, environment, health, public safety, social services—are perpetual shambles. In most of these domains, New Mexico leads or strives to lead to the bottom of national rankings.
Las Cruces shares in the state’s pervasive political culture of incompetence, corruption, and complacency about it all. Those in Las Cruces who pride themselves on their progressive approaches to and stances on issues are strutters who are nevertheless about as ineffectual as political strutters can be. If you want to see back scratching and glad handing at its best, go to a meeting of the Progressive Voters Alliance and listen to its members’ two-minute soundbites. What exactly has the PVA actually accomplished? Nothing. But its members assume a pervasive smugness about the virtues of Democratic predominance despite clear evidence that all is not well in Las Cruces. To give the Police Chief his due, Jeremy Story has reduced petty crime in the city. But homelessness and vandalism are still problems; violence, domestic or random, is rife; and sexual predators abound.
As readers of my blogs know, my attention focuses on public safety, a euphemism for policing, and good government, a matter to which neither the public nor politicians pay much attention. Senator Jeff Steinborn’s effort to reform legislators’ ethics is the outer limit of such a concern. Probably because the state’s Attorney General is elected, not nominated and confirmed as part of the Governor’s administration, there is little control over an office responsible for law enforcement to ensure good policing and good government. Since many AGs aspire to higher office, political considerations too often enter into decisions about which cases to pursue and which to elide. No AG wants to offend the police community or the political powers-that-be. Accordingly, AG Raul Torrez brought in an expert specializing in defending police to clear LCPD officer Jared Cosper of killing Sra. Amelia Baca and is letting NMDOJ lawyers resist my complaint about four former Las Cruces city counselors who violated the Open Meetings Act.
I offer my experiences with the Las Cruces legal community—police officers, judges, and attorneys—as proof of my point. I have no way of knowing whether my experiences are more or less numerous than or different from those of others. My responses have been actions, never for my personal benefit, which most people do not take. I have taken them on the assumption that my experiences are typical and in the hope that I might do some public good. When I received $22,000 from a settlement, I gave $20,000 to Community of Hope and kept the difference only to cover my taxes. My actions engaging the powers-that-be reflect my passion for justice—quite a different thing from the retrograde Right’s cry for “law and order.”
After I challenged five Las Cruces Police Department’s false allegations of code violations, Internal Affairs Sergeant, now Deputy Police Chief, Sean Mullin reported to Police Chief Patrick Gallagher that the allegations were unfounded, that is, false. Neither IA nor Gallagher reported this finding to me; the LCPD did not want to admit its mistake. When I discovered it through an IPRA request, Gallagher and succeeding Police Chiefs Miguel Dominguez and Jeremy Story refused to clear my file. Story even lied that there was no file, then broke his promise to look into it and get back to me when I proved there was one. Hypocritically, the “I” in the LCPD’s slogan P.R.I.D.E stands for “integrity.” Meanwhile, when City Manager Ifo Pili accepted that I was owed an apology detailing the facts, City Attorney Jennifer Vega-Brown prevented it and substituted verbal pablum. Every counselor knew the facts; not one—not my Progressive District 1 representatives Kasandra Gandara and Cassie McClur—did a thing about this injustice.
When I filed complaints about violations of my due process rights and about bias-based policing, the New Mexico Department of Justice under Attorney General Hector Balderas ignored both of them; it did not even acknowledge receiving my electronically filed complaints, much less address them. Balderas clearly wanted to steer clear of complaints which would rile LCPD officers and perhaps their comrades elsewhere in the state, and taint any political ambitions. My blogs went to all city counselors and state legislators; none took any action.
When I requested all records pertaining to the City Council’s Public Safety Select Committee, City Clerk Christine Rivera initially provided only a small fraction of them. When I sued, she released a few more, some redacted, and withheld others, without complying with the IPRA requirements to describe them. When my suit looked to prevail in court, the City settled; it released about 500 records, unredacted much of the redacted records, and withheld only a few. The cost to the City: about $150,000 to pay for IPRA violations which City Clerk Rivera well knew how to avoid, it being her job to fulfill IPRA requests. Again, every counselor knew the facts; not one did a thing about this criminal conduct. With one exception: Progressive City Councilor Becky Corran nominated Rivera for New Mexico's Clerk of the Year in April 2025, who then won. Such was the appreciation of Rivera’s criminal conduct in City Council.
In a recent (21 August) blog, “New Mexico DOJ’s Political Shenanigans Require Legislative Correction,” I copiously detailed the many and various ways in which Department lawyers were attempting to avoid the gravamen of my complaint about members of City Council—the-mayor Ken Miyagishima, Gabe Vasquez (current incumbent Democratic candidate for District 2), Tessa Abeyta, and Kasandra Gandara—who, on a Public Safety Select Committee operating in secret, violated the Open Meetings Act over several years. My suspicions were amply vindicated by a thorough, year-long investigation by the Foundation for Open Government. Every member of the state legislature, including my local representatives Jeff Steinborn and Angelica Rubio, has received my blogs on this complaint; this recent blog was an open letter which I sent to every member of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees; no one in the legislature, notably those on these committees, has replied to me or, so far as I know, taken any action on my complaint. What surprises me is that even Republican legislators in an election year have nothing to say about it. Apparently, a shared interest in protecting fellow politicians overrides considerations of party affiliation, the rule of law, and justice.
In contrast are two experiences with my Virginia representatives when I had trouble with state and federal agencies about my taxes. In the first instance, the Virginia Department of Taxation improperly applied the additional payment accompanying my amended return to the following year, then billed and penalized me for underpaying my taxes for the current year. When I contacted the Department about this mishandling of my taxes, I got no response. My state senator intervened, got the Department to change its methods of handling amended returns, and elicited an apology to me from the Department director.
In the second instance, I asked the IRS whether I was supposed to pay social security taxes for a once-a-week housecleaner. Advised that I was, I filled out 6 years’ worth of quarterly social security returns, paid the taxes due, and later paid all penalties for late payment. The IRS mishandled my returns and claimed that I owed payments of taxes and penalties for a missing quarter. The Taxpayer Advocate, instead of correcting the mishandling, doubled down on the claim and blamed me for a failure to file for that quarter. My senator brought my case before the Senate Finance Committee then investigating IRS performance respecting taxpayers’ complaints. The chair was so outraged by IRS mishandling of my returns and allegations against me that he insisted that an IRS agent to be transferred from her detail to the committee stay with the case until I was satisfied with its resolution. Meanwhile, it turned out that I had been misadvised, that I did not owe social security taxes, and that the IRS had to refund my payments of taxes and penalties, and pay accrued interest. In the end, I received a long and detailed apology from the Taxpayer Advocate; it is framed and hangs in my office, perhaps the only one of its kind in the country. Without the intervention of my senator, I might be sharing a cell with Al Capone.
The point of these two stories is obvious. The non-performance of elected representatives or appointed officials at the city and state level in New Mexico is not typical of those in other cities and states. It is reflective of incompetent, corrupt, or complacent personnel in the Las Cruces Police Department, the Las Cruces City Council, and the New Mexico Department of Justice. It has to be this way, however, because the citizens of Las Cruces and New Mexico are, except in the most outrageous, publicized incidents, indifferent to police misconduct or bad government. And Democrats, especially Progressives, know so, and thus can dodge the duties which would ordinarily be theirs to discharge.
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