Secret Stash

Acting Santa Fe Police Chief Andrew Padilla doesn't have an issue with the public knowing how his officers are armed.

"It's no secret what we have," an affable Padilla tells SFR on a recent afternoon. "We have no top-secret weapons, things that might be in the perception of media or on television shows."

He's half right.

An SFR review of the department's weapons, ammo and select special equipment didn't reveal anything jaw-dropping. There aren't any uber-caliber guns like a .50-cal (the chief can't envision a need for one) and there are no uranium-tipped bullets. There's plenty of firepower and some less-lethal force options that raise questions.

Padilla was willing to talk about all of it.

But the city, through Assistant City Attorney Zach Shandler, has been more willing to apply tortured legal reasoning to the state's transparency laws than to release information about how it arms the officers whose job it is to keep the peace.

Last fall, SFPD spokesman Greg Gurule refused a request for the inventory, citing a public records exemption that protects tactical response plans from publication.

Weapons inventories, of course, contain no such plans. They're lists. Police departments maintain them religiously (or should) because of the need to know who's shooting those guns and how many times, and because a missing gun that shows up down the road as a weapon used in a crime is a galactic embarrassment. Guns, ammunition and other equipment that the public has paid for to arm its police force is of clear public interest. But the city didn't see it that way.

"Providing the types and quantity of armament used by our police officers would but [sic] our officers and the citizens we protect in a vulnerable position by giving anyone who is planning to create a problem information on our capabilities and weaknesses," Gurule wrote.

The problem with that explanation is, to borrow a phrase from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, it's "interpretive jiggery-pokery." And when the Albuquerque Police Department tried the same watery excuse, a state District Court judge didn't buy it. The city might as well refuse to disclose how many officers it employed or the condition of the cars they drove, Judge Alan Malott wrote in 2015. It just didn't make sense, and Malott ordered APD to cough up the inventory.

When SFR disputed Gurule's logic with Santa Fe higher-ups, Shandler produced a list of 34 kinds of weapons owned by the department. It was a spreadsheet with a single column that included a World War II-era rifle and two types of weapons that, according to the list, hadn't even been issued to officers. The department has more than five times that number of sworn officers, and far more than 34 working at once. Unless officers were sharing guns on duty, the "inventory" Shandler provided was a sham.

Through attorney Daniel Yohalem, SFR complained.

"When I asked for a document, this was the document that was provided," came Shandler's response. The law, he explained, doesn't require the city to create an inventory "just because your client believes such a document should exist."

Ironically, there's no good reason the list Shandler initially forked over should exist. Picture the chief of police shouting, "Give me a list of all the types of weapons we have! No, not how many! I just want to see what it is we're shooting out there. Yes, it should include guns we haven't issued!"

After demanding that SFR make another request (four months after the first one) and suggesting SFR was trying to engage in "shuttle diplomacy" by hiring an attorney to force the city to follow the law, Shandler produced an actual inventory on March 2.

And so, Acting Chief Padilla picked up the phone to chat with SFR about how the department arms its officers.

"We provide them with the latest and greatest technology which we can afford within our budget," Padilla explains. Each officer gets a .40-caliber Glock handgun which is with them 24/7. "If they're using the restroom at a gas station, on a call for service … if they had to defend their lives or someone else's, that would be the weapon they would use right then and there."

Officers are also assigned an AR-15 or M4 rifle, of which the department has 173 combined, a Remington Model 870 shotgun and a Taser stun gun. It's enough to keep safe both officers and the public, Padilla says.

While the department is transitioning to newer Tasers that deliver less electricity to the people officers target, it still relies on the Taser X26, a model the Arizona-based law enforcement giant no longer sells. Taser has never admitted the X26 shocks people with more electricity than is safe or necessary, but it's been sued scores of times for deaths related to the weapon's use.

Padilla says concerns about the relative strength of the X26—it delivers double the jolt of the newer models—have never come up at SFPD. The older Tasers are around, in part, because the company sometimes offers buy-back deals that can shave a couple hundred dollars off the price of a newer weapon, the acting chief says.

Santa Fe police also have specialized units, including a SWAT team that utilizes five sniper rifles. They were on rooftops during the Entrada last summer as well as during Zozobra. Especially during the burning of Old Man Gloom, the weapons were visible.

"The public [who see this] should know that they are safe and secure at this event," Padilla says. "This is nothing new. For the last 20-plus years we've always had our observers at Zozobra."

"We're training constantly," he says.

And he doesn't have an issue with the public knowing how his officers are armed, because "these weapons are to protect them, and to protect the officers' lives."