Santa Fe Police, Sheriff Miss Out on State Funding

SF Police, Sheriff miss out on state officer funding

Police departments across the state will be hiring more than 300 new officers following awards of $40 million from the Law Enforcement Recruitment Fund, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced Friday. The funding, an outgrowth of the crime package passed during the 2022 Legislature, will allocate a total of $41.5 million to 29 departments over the next three years, with full funding the first year—based on an average annual salary of $75,000—50% the second year and 25% the third year. The governor’s office says the awards were based on needs identified by the individual departments in their application process. Neither the Santa Fe Police Department nor the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office received any funds because, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports, neither applied. SFPD says it intends to apply later this fall when it hires its next round of cadets. Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza, however, said the funding was tied to a survey he failed to fill out, a process he characterized as unfair. Albuquerque and Las Cruces will be hiring the most new officers—67 each—followed by Hobbs, which was funded to hire 38, and San Juan County Sheriff’s Office at 24. The Rio Arriba Sheriff’s Office received $918,750 to hire seven new officers. “I want to thank the governor for keeping her promise to law enforcement to deliver this funding to our department, which will enable me and my team to better serve the people of Rio Arriba County,” Rio Arriba County Sheriff Billy Merrifield said in a statement Friday.

DOH reports small decline in youth suicide

New Mexico health officials last week credited a variety of initiatives for new provisional data showing a slight decrease in 2021 youth suicide rates for ages 5 to 18 in the state for 2021. Final figures are expected later this fall, the department says in a news release. In response to questions regarding the exact figures, which were not provided in the DOH news release, Public Information Officer David Morgan tells SFR 2021 provisional data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention showed a 16.1% reduction in the rate of deaths among New Mexico youth over 2020. That percentage, Morgan writes, “sounds more significant than it is,” and only reflects five fewer deaths, which is why the department referred to the decrease as “a small decline,” he wrote. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has designated September as Suicide Prevention Month in order to spotlight suicide as a top health concern in the state. In its news release, DOH noted an increased public awareness campaign; DOH oversight of the New Mexico Suicide Prevention Coalition; and new partnerships and initiatives around suicide as contributing to the decline. “Suicide prevention works,” Acting Health Secretary Dr. David Scrase said in a statement. “It requires concerted effort of people properly equipped with training and resources. We need to maintain focus on our ongoing efforts to improve New Mexico’s mental healthcare system.” According to the CDC data provided by Morgan, adult suicide last year increased by 4.3% (from 483 to 505). In 2020, New Mexico ranked fourth in the nation for age-adjusted suicide rates.

Advocates, experts say Griffin decision could effect Trump

First Judicial District Judge Francis Mathew’s ruling last week to bar Cowboys for Trump founder and now-former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin from holding public office continues to reverberate nationally. Griffin at the end of last week attended the commission’s first meeting since Mathew’s ruling, and spoke during the public comment period; he says he intends to appeal the ruling, and won’t represent himself in court this time but will instead hire “some great legal minds.” In an op-ed for NBC News, Noah Bookbinder and Donald K. Sherman, executive and deputy directors for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington—which represented with co-counsel the Santa Fe and Los Alamos residents who brought the suit seeking Griffin’s ouster—write that while “most Americans have never heard of Couy Griffin,” his case “has profound significance for all Americans,” because the court identified the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol as an insurrection under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. “If other courts agree, that is a principle that should now be applied to other state government officials who supported or were in league with Jan. 6 insurrectionists and to national leaders who incited the attack on the Capitol. It is a principle that should be applied to former government officials, like former President Donald Trump, should they seek to enter government again,” the op-ed says. Gerard Magliocca, a constitutional scholar at Indiana University who has studied Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, concurs, telling the Washington Post: “If this ruling stands up on appeal, it sets a significant precedent for the next election cycle,” he says. “After all, if Couy Griffin is disqualified from holding office for his role in Jan. 6, then shouldn’t Donald Trump be disqualified for his even greater role in Jan. 6th?”Also recently in the Post: A look at former New Mexico State University Professor David Clements, fired last year for refusing to comply with COVID-19 vaccination requirements. An ardent Trump supporter, Clements played a role in convincing the Otero County Commission to refuse to certify the June 7 primary election results, and continues to promote conspiracy theories regarding the 2020 election. Clements has “taken his message nationwide,” the Post writes, “traveling to small towns in more than a dozen states, with a focus, he said, on places that are ‘forgotten and abandoned and overlooked.’ His crusade to prove that voting systems can’t be trusted has deepened fears among election experts, who say his meritless claims could give Trump allies more fodder to try to disrupt elections in November and beyond.”

COVID-19 by the numbers

Reported Sept. 9

New cases: 326; 613,896 total cases

Deaths: four; Santa Fe County has had 348 total deaths; there have been 8,483 fatalities statewide. Statewide hospitalizations: 111. Patients on ventilators: five. According to the state’s most recent statewide hospitalization report, 86 people have been hospitalized in the last seven days—about 12% fewer than the week before.

Case rates: According to the state health department’s most recent report on geographical trends for the seven-day period of Aug. 29-Sept. 4, Santa Fe County’s case rate was 19.4, compared to 19.8 the previous week. The state recorded 2,407 cases statewide—based on reported cases—over the seven-day period, a nearly 30% decrease from the prior week.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent update for COVID-19 “community levels,” New Mexico has no red counties, but Santa Fe County slipped from “green” (good) to “yellow” (medium) and is now one of six yellow counties. The state map, which updates each Thursday for the prior seven-day period, uses a framework that combines case rates with hospital metrics. The community levels site has accompanying recommendations at the bottom of the page. The CDC also provides a quarantine and isolation calculator.

Resources: Vaccine registration; Booster registration; Self-report a positive COVID-19 test result to the health department; Curative testing sites; COVID-19 treatment info: oral treatments and monoclonal antibody treatments; Toolkit for immunocompromised individuals. People seeking treatment who do not have a medical provider can call NMDOH’s COVID-19 hotline at 1-855-600-3453.

You can read all of SFR’s COVID-19 coverage here.

Listen up

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham sits down with Our Land host Laura Paskus on the show’s most recent episode to discuss a variety of environmental concerns facing New Mexico, including wildfire, drought and a plan to store spent nuclear fuel in the state—which the governor opposes. “It’s not an easy or straightforward path,” she said discussing how the state might thwart Holtec International’s plan. “No state is going to stand up and volunteer to take the most dangerous waste from…our nuclear energy and nuclear power plants.” That being said, “We are poised to fight it,” she adds.

Mystery solved

Mystery author and Santa Fe resident Anne Hillerman, daughter of renowned New Mexico mystery writer Tony Hillerman, shares her appreciation for yet another New Mexico author in her introduction to Frances Crane’s 1941 novel The Turquoise Shop, recently re-published under Penzler Publishers’ American Mystery Classics imprint. In that introduction, re-printed by CrimeReads, Hillerman writes: “One of the great joys of discovering a skillfully constructed novel is the story’s ability to put the readers inside the skin of the characters. We get to live in the place and time in which the fictional world unfolds. In the case of Frances Crane’s The Turquoise Shop, readers travel back to the 1940s and a small town in northern New Mexico filled with pleasantly quirky folks and a pair of murders to be solved.” Because Crane lived part of her life in Taos—where she settled after leaving Nazi Germany in the 1930s—Hillerman writes, “it isn’t difficult to imagine that she based her fictional Santa Maria on Taos.” The book is the first in Crane’s long-running detective series featuring private investigator Pat Abbott and his future wife Jean, which also was adapted for multiple radio programs in the ‘40s and ‘50s. “What’s the point, one might ask, of bringing back this old classic?” Hillerman writes in her introduction’s conclusion. “The reason is a return to reading for pleasure, relaxed enjoyment and pure, stress-free entertainment. The Turquoise Shop provides a time travel experience back to a simpler and fascinating world.”

A dancer looks back

We last mentioned acclaimed choreographer, dancer and Santa Fe native Dana Tai Soon Burgess in April, when the Smithsonian magazine previewed two forthcoming performances (including in New Mexico next spring), as well as Burgess’ highly awaited memoir, Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly. The wait is over. UNM Press published the book this month, and El Palacio magazine provides excerpts featuring his memories of Santa Fe, a place he says influenced his choreographic aesthetic. The excerpt discusses Burgess’ family’s move to Santa Fe from California’ Carmel Valley, and his introduction to Santa Fe’s insects and rodents; culture; and religious influences. “The Santa Fe of my childhood was not yet the Hollywood branded version that it was to become,” he writes. “The year 1973 marked the beginning of a financial recession. It was eight years before Ralph Lauren would launch his Santa Fe Style fashion and home décor line, a decade before actor Val Kilmer would begin popping up at restaurants, and twenty years before actress and best-selling memoirist Shirley MacLaine felt the radiating crystal energy of the land and chronicled sightings of UFOs from her Santa Fe house on a hill. Santa Fe was a gritty Southwestern town that was more like a sprawling pueblo.”

Dry off

The National Weather Service forecasts just a 10% chance for showers and thunderstorms after 3 pm today. Otherwise, it will be sunny, with a high temperature near 79 degrees and northeast wind 5 to 10 mph becoming west in the afternoon.

Thanks for reading! Fall = cozy reading weather, and The Word wants to read every novel on this fall reading list—especially Andrew Sean Greer’s sequel to his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Less.