Police recruitment is a problem everywhere; T or C offers take-home car

by Kathleen Sloan | August 3, 2021
5 min read
T or C police cars and headquarters
Whether uncompetitive salaries have hindered the city's recent police recruitment efforts may have to be addressed if the perk of a take-home car makes little difference. Photograph by Diana Tittle

Truth or Consequences city commissioners passed a resolution setting policy on take-home vehicles that requires area residency for city employees but carves out an exception for police officers. The policy gives the city commission authority to consider allowing officers to take home patrol cars—even if they live in Las Cruces or farther away.

However, the police vehicle may be used only for city business under the new policy, which was justified by the possibility that a “call out” requiring an officer to immediately return to duty might occur while the officer is at home.

Commissioner Frances Luna objected to the carve out during a lengthy discussion about the policy at the July 28 commission meeting. She claimed that police officers living outside the city “are less vested in the community,” do not pay property tax or as much gross receipts taxes and will commute “on the city’s dime.”

When a call out occurs, Luna said, an officer “should drive to the city in their own vehicle [to pick up the police vehicle].” She pointed out that it would make sense to allow officers to live outside of the city but still within county boundaries if they were “cross-deputized.” Since such cooperation does not exist between the city police department and county sheriff’s office, “they should live in the city.”

City Manager Bruce Swingle agreed officers living outside the city are less vested, but the “new reality” of police officer recruitment throughout the United States means the city is competing with agencies “offering $5,000 to $20,000 sign-up bonuses.”

“I’m afraid we would lose some officers we have if we don’t allow them to take home police vehicles,” Swingle said.

“They may not want to uproot their kids [to move to T or C], and we need to give them an incentive,” Mayor Sandra Whitehead said, while also stating she agreed with Luna’s assessment. She asked new Chief of Police Victor Rodriguez: “Don’t you live in Belen?”

“Rio Rancho,” Rodriguez responded. As part of the chief’s contract, the city has provided him with a rent-free home at the municipal golf course that he has yet to occupy, perhaps because, as Swingle mentioned, Rodriguez has a son who is a senior in high school.

Mayor Pro Tem Amanda Forrister said that the recruitment of both city employees and police officers would suffer if the city required that all new hires live in town. Her fellow commissioners eventually approved a resolution that allows city employees whose on-call jobs require a take-home vehicle to live up to 30 miles away. Police officers were exempted from any distance requirement. The new policy, Swingle assured the city commission, requires that all requests to award an employee a take-home vehicle will first come to the commission for approval.

The Sun later asked Swingle whether recruitment of T or C police officers has been affected by the salary the city offers. The Sun also asked if the city police department still has control over the local-option gross receipts tax of .25 cents passed by the city commission about 10 years ago. That tax was instituted to give T or C the ability to offer competitive salaries that would attract and retain police officers. 

T or C borrowed $580,000 from the police department GRT in 2018 and 2019 to build the city animal shelter, Swingle said during a July 29 interview. It has paid back a total of $569,000. Currently, the police department has accumulated about $800,000 in GRT revenue. In recent years those revenues have been dedicated to funding annual raises of $1.50 an hour. Rodriguez, who joined the force about three weeks ago, will decide whether the $1.50 per hour raise will be given again this year, Swingle said.

The city manager acknowledged that T or C police salaries still may not be competitive enough. “We offer salaries higher than the county sheriff’s office,” he said. “We don’t offer salaries higher than the state police. We may have to offer higher salaries.”

Other factors are at play in the nationwide police recruitment problem, Swingle claimed. “It’s the scrutiny,” he said. “There were several anti-law enforcement bills introduced during the last [session of the state] legislature. And we’ve abandoned behavioral health nationwide; people call the police.”

The question of whether the city needs to pay the police department the remaining money borrowed from its GRT was raised by Commissioner Luna during a May 7 budget session. Luna argued that building an animal shelter could fall under the larger definition of “public safety.” She also argued that the GRT should be used for purposes other than salaries.

Whether the city police will retain control over the local-option GRT was never resolved, Swingle said, “and at this point the question is moot.”

State legislation passed in March, Swingle said, erased separate accounting of all the types of local-option gross receipts taxes levied by counties and cities, lumping them into one category. The change eliminated a massive administrative headache for the state, which no longer has to track numerous separate GRT funds. “But they still charge a 10 percent administrative fee,” Swingle noted. 

Carol Kirkpatrick, T or C’s chief financial officer, still keeps track of the city’s separate GRT funds, the city manager said. But the city now deposits all GRT revenue in the General Fund, including the police GRT.

The city has advertised for police officers since July 7, with no response, Swingle told the city commission. Ads have been posted on the city’s website, in the Sierra County Sentinel, on the Policeone.com website and on the New Mexico Workforce Solutions website.  

“We are looking for qualified candidates,” Rodriguez told the city commission. “I’d rather work shorthanded than with the wrong person.”

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Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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