Council - workshop

Thank you.

Well, good afternoon. Welcome to the work session. Today is Monday, July 27, 2026. It's approximately 1 PM. I'm Mayor Eric Enriquez. We will start with a moment of silence for the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces. And also for the Las Cruces Police Department, Las Cruces Fire Department as they keep our city safe 24-7, 365. If you'll join me in the pledge. Okay, we'll start out with our agenda. We only have one item on the agenda today. It's 1.1, the 10th Semi-Annual Police Audit Summary Evaluation, presented by the OIR Group. Viola?

Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, City Council. I'm Viola Perea, City Auditor. Today we have the OIR group with us to present their 10th Semi-Annual Police Audit Report for Council. I'd like to introduce our two presenters today. We have Teresa Magula and Steve Connolly.

Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, council members. Thank you so much for having us back to your beautiful city. I am Teresa Magula, and I have my colleague Steve Conley here with me. We are here to present, as we do twice a year, our review of the Las Cruces Police Department administrative investigations. So we know most of you, and so this becomes a little repetitive, but for members of the audience who may not be aware of who we are and what we do, Steve and I are two members of OIR Group. We are a team of police practice experts. We have about 20 years of experience as independent police auditors throughout various jurisdictions, mainly in California, but of course also here in Las Cruces and a variety of other places throughout the United States. States. It is important here to note that our scope of work is to review closed administrative investigations that were conducted by the Las Cruces Police Department. So our role is not to investigate those directly. It is also not to issue any kind of findings or discipline related to those. That all lives within the Office of the Chief of Police and his command staff. What we do is we come in after the fact when an investigation has been closed. If there's any discipline, it has been issued. And what we're doing is looking at the systems and the processes that this department has in place to hold its personnel accountable. And so what we're looking for mainly are administrative investigations that are complete, objective, thorough, and fair. So not only are we looking at the investigations themselves, but also the findings, any kind of outcome, whether that's disciplinary or otherwise, and determining whether it fits into those review categories. order to do that we have full access to the department's administrative investigations these are things that might otherwise be confidential or if they're available to members of the public they may be redacted and we have the full file provided to us nothing is redacted we have body-worn camera footage we look at police reports sometimes there's radio communications the whole scope of that particular administrative file is made available to us So in the past, in the past five years or so, we have presented to you on a twice annual basis, and we have provided a review of the cases that were closed within the first half or the second half of the calendar year. And as of March of this year, we worked collaboratively both with city leadership as well as with department leadership in crafting a new contract and a relatively similar but expanded scope of work. So this report here is a bit of a hybrid. And so we apologize for any confusion that that might cause because we have the first half, January to March, in which we were using our previous model. that was looking at internal and external investigations that led to a formal investigation. We were providing full memos with respect to each of those cases. So you'll see at the back of the agenda packet, there's four cases that we reviewed in that way. After March, our scope of work expanded. And so we were able to start receiving cases that were submitted by members of the public, external complaints that were classified in two different categories, category two and category three. So these are complaints that when they came into the department, they were classified as matters that likely would not rise to the level of a formal investigation. What does that look like? It means, for example, someone might be contacting the department with what appears to be a complaint, but upon some form of investigation, it's determined that it's really just a question. We had one of these cases where a member of the public was looking for information about a protest event in the city and what was the sort of right method for LCPD to respond and so on. That question was answered, and that was determined to be a category two external complaint. Category three, we get a little more nuanced and weedsy. I'm going to leave the discussion of that to Steve a little later in the presentation. But suffice to say that it is complaints from members of the Las Cruces community that the department has classified as something that, upon face value, does not have any overt misconduct within the narrative of that complaint. So why a change in the scope of work? Well, this came from a variety of different places. One was from this council who was asking, are we actually seeing everything that members of the public are complaining about? Two was from community who was concerned that there was some kind of screening process that was happening that was preventing us as auditors from reviewing everything coming in. And three was from the chief himself who determined that he would like us to see everything to prevent any concerns that there might be bias or a shielding or screening process of any kind. So we're now receiving all of those. So in this reporting period, we have 21 cases that we reviewed. And just to give some context about where the scope changed a little bit and expanded the scope, in previous cycles, we may have been reviewing anywhere between 10 to 16 cases. And with the inclusion of the new complaint categories that we're now receiving, we're up to 21. As you see, there's a slight difference there. And we are receiving and reviewing more things. Again, I'll remind everyone that these are cases that were closed in the first and second quarters of 2026, so our closing period was June 30th of 26, and we're reporting here to you in late July with that report. These complaints covered about 30 employees of the police department, and some of those were officers, the majority of them were officers, but also in this period we saw some complaints against some non-sworn personnel. Those were, for example, animal control or codes officers. They may have been some administrative personnel within the department as well. So we're looking at about 30 officers that were named in these complaints. So this first piece of our audit is the internal investigations. This has not changed. This has always been the same. These are cases that are initiated within the department. So a supervisor or command staff member identifies what is likely or possibly misconduct and opens a formal administrative investigation through internal affairs. We had 12 of those cases in this period, and that aligns with our past reporting periods. These generated about 42 unique allegations against a handful of predominantly officers. And the large number of those were related to vehicle pursuits and uses of force. A couple cases that generated a large amount of allegations. So we're not talking like 40 different allegations. It's all within one case. Various policy implications within each case that might lend a case to have 5, 10, 15 allegations within there. The remaining were around kind of procedural reporting issues, evidence handling, and so on. These internal cases really indicate to us that LCPD is doing a commendable job identifying and addressing those issues for their own employees. They're not waiting to hear about it from an external source. They themselves are identifying them, managing them, and correcting that behavior. Now here's where our scope has expanded, and that's the external investigations. So in previous iterations of our reports, we may have seen anywhere between three and five cases of externals. Now we're up to nine. And the majority of those were in that category three, which Steve will elaborate more on. But that has increased that scope of work and allowed us to have a broader lens into the types of things that are concerning for members of community. The majority of these are related to customer service and reporting issues. That's not surprising. These are mostly things that have to do with how an individual perceives the interaction that he or she had with a member of the Las Cruces Police Department. And so some of these hinge largely on perception, It hinges on communication and the effectiveness of that communication, and on perceived service delivery. Some of these have to do with officer discretion. So sometimes when an officer responds to the field, he or she has sort of a breadth of ways that they might respond to something. And a member of the public might feel it should be A, and the officer chooses B, C, or D, right? And that leads to a dissatisfaction, when really it's within policy, procedure, practice for the officer to have responded in that way. Outcomes. This is really where we get most of our findings with respect to the cases that we review. And these, for the most part, the internal investigations were sustained. This, again, not surprising. If this is something that a member of the Las Cruces Police Department has already raised as a challenge or a concern, it is likely that that's going to be true and result in some form of corrective action on the back end. The external investigations, we saw two sustained allegations, and the remaining were not sustained. And again, in large part, because it has to do with that perception issue with communication, where something might not be objectively misconduct, but it has some room for perhaps some corrective action or improvement in the way that customer service delivery is happening. Or in some cases, the officer acted precisely as he or she should have, and it's that dissatisfaction by the end user of the system. These external complaints, despite having a low sustained rate, are still an important piece of the puzzle, right? Because they're illuminating both to us as auditors, to the department, to you as council members, those expectations and potential trust issues that community may have with its police department. So we see them as a valuable and critical component of this work. Part of our scope of work is related to the complaint demographics, and we've provided some information about this since the start of our engagement. We now have about 73 complainants for which we can identify a race or ethnicity, and we continue to find that in our very limited statistical sample here, there is no evidence that race or ethnicity was a factor in the complaints, the outcomes, or the status of the employee relative to the complainant. In other words, are Hispanic members of the community receiving a disproportionate number of service complaints? We're not seeing that. We started to break down the location data. So we take a look at the zip codes in which these complaints are being originated. And in previous sessions, we reported to you that the majority of those, because they're internal complaints, happened with the department's zip code. And that doesn't really give us any meaningful data. So we took a look at the complaints made by members of the public in isolation. And what we saw here is that they were fairly evenly distributed among the three more populated zip codes in your community. And so we have 88001, 012, and 005, and those have a very equal amount of complaints generated from them. So again, it's matching sort of the demographics of the city. The more populous areas may have more calls for service, may generate more complaints, but I'm not seeing anything, again, very rudimentary statistical analysis, not seeing anything that might suggest that there's a pattern of over-policing or particularly hostile or dissatisfying policing in a particular area of your city. And then finally, we get to discipline. And we have the sustained allegations that are resulting in some form of formal discipline. That can be a verbal reprimand, it can be suspension, so days off for that particular misconduct. And then in one case in this particular sample, we had a trainee who was released from the agency. Irrespective of the finding, whether it's sustained or not, LCPD is providing some form of debrief or counseling or conversation or even retraining with those involved officers. And we see that really as the hallmark of an agency that's looking toward how do we make things better? Even if we haven't done a formal policy violation, how do we make this engagement with our community better? How do we tactically perform better? And certainly that's something that LCPD is committed to, and it's looking future forward. Turn it over to Steve now. He's going to talk about some of our key findings that we've seen in this particular period.

Thank you, Theresa, and good afternoon, Mr. Mayor and counselors. Very happy to be back with you again. In terms of the reporting process that some of you are already very familiar with by now, obviously the individual case studies are the meat and potatoes of our work during the year, but then twice a year, this is an opportunity for us to kind of take a step back and look more broadly at trends and any patterns and have the opportunity to kind of dialogue with the department in a different way. as opposed to our engagement on individual case outcomes and just the questions that we have as we're working through uh... the evidence that teresa was talking about uh... in terms of some of the findings and recommendations that emerged from from this report uh... that this first slide talks about our review of critical incidents there were two critical incidents officer involved shooting cases that had gone through the entirety of their process during this cycle. So we had the opportunity to review both of those. And as the report talks about, we have worked with the department and focused on this issue a great deal. We are impressed with the review mechanisms that the department has in place. Obviously, there are a lot of formal investigative processes here. There's a full-fledged criminal investigation into the legality of the officers' actions. But the department's administrative assessment of it is is also going to be a very, very important. In terms of not only making sure that people are adhering to policy, which is sort of the bottom line question, but more broadly, are the officers. Following training are there lessons to be learned from these these very significant events these impactful events on the Community. and adjustments that the department can or should be making across a variety of different categories and uh... as i say we have found that the department has has ramped up that process in the last few years particularly under chief story i know that it is a point of emphasis for him one of the things that we talk about here and we see their work uh... periodically if there's a use of force case that not you know isn't necessarily an officer involved shooting case But it's a use of force that there is some concern about whether that force was in policy or not. The department has a cadre of subject matter experts who are going to review that very, very carefully and comprehensively to see if the use of force was consistent with the law, consistent with department policy, consistent with department expectations. and if necessary it's gonna have there'll be some remedial steps taken with the officers and again the potential for lesson lessons learned one of the areas where we've had some i guess mild disagreement with the the department in it's it's kind of a It's a funny problem to have. We are very, very complimentary of the work of the force review cadre. We think they do an excellent, thoughtful job and we would like to see that glass broken and that tool used on a greater range of incidents than the department has currently allotted. Most significantly, we really feel like every officer-involved shooting case should just kind of automatically be brought to that force review cadre so that we know that they're gonna give it their full workup. We've talked to the chief about this extensively, and again, in some ways it's a compliment to the process that he has implemented. He has said a couple things about it, and I don't want to speak for him, but what he has basically said to us is he will certainly feel free to use that if necessary, if the circumstances of the case warrant it. But he also has resource concerns. I mean, these folks that are part of this team, they wear a number of different hats in the department. And from a resource perspective, he's concerned about the feasibility of it. And maybe most importantly, from his perspective, and it's a point that we respect, Any one of these events is automatically going to get a rigorous level of scrutiny from within the department managerial ranks. It's going to be looked at carefully. They're going to be looking for lessons and adjustments and so forth. And so that formal step is not necessarily required in order to make that happen. And again, we will keep talking with him about this from our perspective. Just the whole idea of the formality of it and the documentation of it, that way we know that some of the things that we have questions about are getting talked about and identified and I think there's probably a happy medium in there somewhere, but that is one of the recommendations that we have, is just to more comprehensively document some of the analysis that is taking place in the aftermath of these events. Okay, Teresa mentioned the category three cases, which probably the biggest change in our paradigm from past visits that we've had here. She talked a lot about the impetus behind it, which is the idea that there was a small category of complaints from the public that we were not seeing. And so the department and the city decided that we were going to address that by just having us get everything. And a little bit about the category three cases. They could go into category three in a couple of different ways one being that the complaint on its face even if everything were true Would not constitute a policy violation on the part of the officers just by the very nature of what is being alleged and secondly They also put into category three cases in which the initial triage, the initial review of the evidence, and I think the body-worn camera recordings play a huge role in this, the department recognizes based on its initial review of the evidence that there is no merit to the allegations and that they are therefore ready to stop the process and call the case exonerated or unfounded without sending it along for a formal investigation that's going to involve interviewing the officers and is probably going to be a lot more time consuming and a lot more steps to it. So, again, that makes perfect sense to us. We see it in other jurisdictions where we work. There are a lot of agencies that have a similar model for addressing and dispoing cases. But the potential criticism is, well, OK, the department has reviewed that body-worn camera and said that we're done. But if that's the end of the process and it never makes to us, we don't have the opportunity to do that same review of the body-worn camera evidence and kind of come to our own conclusions about it. So that has been addressed. And as Teresa said, we had a number of matters that we would not have previously seen that we did get in this review period. Others of our findings relate to communication and customer service. That's a big theme for us. A lot of the, obviously, the significant events, the critical incidents, the officer-involved shooting cases very, very understandably get... the lion's share of public attention and concern and media attention and concern. But for a lot of members of the public, their perception, their experience of policing in Las Cruces is down at a much lower level of stress, if you will. But those are still impactful experiences encounters and and the whole idea that the department is that the officers are trying to put their best foot forward and and working on their communication skills and trying to provide as Teresa was saying good customer service even under circumstances that are challenging and even with people that are difficult we saw a few instances of that where again and we we kind of hold the department to a high standard in this regard We see places where the communication probably could have been different or better, and we've encouraged the department to keep an eye on that and to make it a point of not only scrutiny in the review process, but a point of emphasis in terms of the regular culture of the department and the standards that it is imparting down to the officers at the field level. Other notable issues events from this period of time. I'm sure the chief has informed you about the department's participation in the CALEA accreditation process. That is a national organization for standards in law enforcement that we are very familiar with. A number of our agencies are CALEA certified agencies. And the department has made a huge commitment over the last few years to put all of its pieces in place and meet the very rigorous standards for CALEA certification. We actually had the opportunity to be a part of that. Oversight is one of the things that they are interested in as part of, again, contemporary policing standards. And we were happy to meet with the CALEA team and talk to them a little bit about our experiences. we were pleased to be able to say that we have found the department to absolutely meet its obligations in terms of providing us with everything that we need but beyond that being willing to engage with us and and we debate about things and have our recommendations and sometimes they get accepted and sometimes they don't but we we never feel like we're not being heard or that the department isn't taking us seriously or that they're just trying to marginalize us and shrink the impact of our work in whatever ways they can. So we were, again, pleased to be able to share that with the accreditation team. And then we're also aware of the department's efforts. We were just talking about communication, customer service. The chief shared with us the department's participation in this trust-building project, which involved the auditing of thousands, the AI-generated auditing of thousands of hours of body-worn camera. I think the marks for the department were pretty high overall in terms of the effectiveness of the interactions and in terms of... resident or or community member perception as well as as the officers uh... behavior and experience of it and to the extent that there were uh... you know a small percentage of cases where for one reason or another the interaction didn't go as as effectively as it could have or ideally would have the whole idea is to to say hey we would like to get to a hundred percent we know that that's not always possible and that we can't always obviously control the willingness of members of the public to engage with us and to be compliant cooperative and to work with attempts at de-escalation and and kind of um you know restructuring situations that are not going well but the goal is for the department to always be able to be in a position to put its best foot forward and i i think it's great that the the department and the chief have shown a commitment to that One last thing, obviously we hope that we'll be able to share our perspective and maybe more importantly learn from the feedback of community members who attend tonight's listening session. It's going to be right here in the council chambers. And the last thing I would say, Teresa talked about the ways that our contract has evolved and that our scope of work has changed. One of the things that's new is we got into town last night and had the opportunity to spend the morning participating in some training that the department put together for us. That's a new element of our contractual obligations. And we went through a discussion of some of the legal standards, use of force that the officers are learning, and also had the opportunity to participate in some scenario training, which I understand you folks are directly familiar with yourselves. So we appreciated that opportunity, and as the chief said, which he appreciated, which we appreciated, he said, we know you have some familiarity with, I mean, probably more than you folks who have real jobs and regular lives. We know this stuff pretty well from having been doing it for a really long time. And he said, we're not trying to teach you things that we recognize you already know, but the idea is for us to get a sense of what the department is learning and what points of emphasis the officers are being given. And I will tell you, I think, speaking for Teresa, we were both impressed with the thoughtfulness and the thoroughness and I think the constructive nature of the the training that we attended. So thank you for listening, and as always, you know, we're here to respond to any questions that you folks might have about particular aspects of the report. So thank you.

Well, thank you, Stephen, and thank you, Teresa, for the presentation. I'll turn to counsel to see if there's any questions. Counselor Corrine.

Thank you, thank you for your presentation as ever and your report, and thank you to Chief Story for also sharing that other report that was alluded to here and has been very informative. My two questions are sort of related to two things that I think were called out specifically by a couple of things in the report. One is really related to something that is, many things are not necessarily our place to sort of dictate, but one of them is related to the folks who do the background check for the initial hiring of of officers, I did notice that there was a little, that there was a reference to perhaps that not being the most robust background check process that might have been happening, and I just wanted to sort of see if there's any additional conversation, like if that's an issue of who we are hiring or who we're contracting with, I would love, I would hope that we can really evaluate that. Because the cost of things like this slipping through seems pretty high in terms of training and effort that the department puts into folks. And I think we should do that for people who are well background checked. So I'm wondering if Chief or you all can sort of speak more to that. And then the other question I have is related to a specific policy.

Good afternoon, Mayor, Councillor Curran, Jeremy Stewart, Police Chief, for the record. So it's a good question. It's a fair question. I'll give you a little bit, just a quick history on kind of what we've done in the past. So when I started and for probably 15 years plus after that, we did all of our background investigations in-house. Officers would go through specialized training for conducting pre-employment backgrounds, and then they would do them. There's pros and cons to that. When I was at the academy, we started contracting partially just because of capacity. We had to get through this process a little bit more efficiently with a company that had already done backgrounds for other agencies within the state, including the New Mexico State Police. So that's the company we have used since. Now, in this specific case, we all agree that there were some things done by that particular investigator that weren't optimal. It wasn't that it wasn't necessarily a thorough background, but it wasn't thorough enough because there were some things that probably should have been caught. not not as egregious as it might sound on the surface but definitely not to our satisfaction so the conversations have been had with that company with the ownership of that company overall they do really good background investigations they've expanded like i said they do them from new exxon state police and other agencies and part of that expansion i think was letting some of the internal controls slip a little bit they have high standards there's a review process And so where we're at, I say all that, where we're at right now is I still feel comfortable using this company, especially after the meeting we had. That being said, there's gonna be extra checks on our end to make sure that there's redundancy in place. And if we have any future issues, I'm absolutely open to looking at other vendors that can do a better job. But when you zoom out, by and large, most of those investigations are very thorough and they do a good job.

No, thank you, that is extremely helpful actually to understand that context. And I think the thing that happened also seems like it may have been a combination of perhaps information and systems data, which I know that you all are always navigating and they're always navigating too, so I suspect it's in addition to the interview process. But I really appreciate the context and sharing of that because I wouldn't want us to be doing something that is maybe not up to what you would expect or what you would hope for to screen folks. And then my second question was related to something that I didn't know was part of our sort of, I know that chase and pursuit policies are a very hotly debated topic and I think this is one of the really interesting ones in your sort of portfolio that you all looked at this time, and the technology that's used in lieu of a chase that I didn't really know anything about. I was really interested to know... If maybe you all could share an update or best practices or if this is a new thing I just I I thought that our policy toward pursuit is aimed at protecting the public and this technology really seems like it's enabling additional protection of the public when when it's deployed on behalf of The the chase so I'm wondering if you all could talk a little bit more about that because this seems like evolving rapidly evolving technological situation and if there are any policy or training related things that if you wanted to share, I would love to hear them.

yeah thank you for that question council member coran certainly as you're mentioning this is all developing sort of in real time it's one of these like building the plane mid-flight situations and we're seeing this in every jurisdiction where we're working where this new technology is just coming at departments it's coming at all of us One of the things that we're gratified to see with this department in particular is in the development of their real-time crime center, which we were able to visit in our last visit. They've really put a lot of thought into how to best deploy the technology so that it is effective for members of the public and for public safety, but also has sufficient guardrails on some of the things that we're concerned about related to privacy or over surveillance or the concerns that are coming out around data sharing or retention. With particular emphasis on Starchase, that's the technology that you're alluding to in the vehicle pursuit. That's relatively new. I know this department is using it and there are two that we work with in California that are using it. It's deployed infrequently at the moment, I think because it has some challenges in terms of the deployment capacity and the distance for it and so on. And so it's just now starting to be used. So I think as we see more cases, we'll be able to develop sort of more controls or guardrails or policies related to them. But really, ultimately, when these real-time crime centers are being constructed and they're being deployed, we're looking for the consideration of both, is the technology something we want to adopt? Is it effective? Is it useful? Like really, not just because the vendor came and told you it was. And I think this department has done a good job of vetting that, as well as what are we putting in place in advance of any challenges or concerns coming across that can help to mitigate and put those guardrails up. So it's all kind of developing in real time, and we're very mindful of how that's happening across the nation, for sure.

and mayor and council i'll just add to that star chase we've actually had star chase for quite a while as a sergeant in the game when we got it and we were the first unit to have it so my guess is 2016 or 2017 maybe is when we got star chase we've used it effectively a number of times however we don't have a ton of the system so they're not They're not probably used more than a handful of times a year, but they do help prevent pursuits when we use them. And New Mexico has a very restrictive pursuit policy, I guess you could say, through statute, the New Mexico State Pursuit Act. So the departments have to reflect that, whether you want to or not. So we have to be creative in the sense that we still want to try to get people's vehicles back when they're stolen, but we can't necessarily chase them. So we have to use these different technologies and leverage them. And I think having a bunch of different options is good because it allows us to adapt to whatever that particular situation is. We don't obviously catch them all, but it helps.

Thank you. Those were the two things that I really appreciate the background and sort of the context for all of that.

And that, you know, this is an effort on the technology front.

I understand the balance that y'all are trying to strike, and I really appreciate you talking through that. Thanks.

Council Member Coleman.

Thank you. Thank you both so much. It's really great to see you again. Thank you for being here. I'm really glad that you've been able to see the Real-Time Crime Center and that you've been able to engage in some of the other training opportunities that the department has provided. I'll start with these questions. I had similar questions. Today, I don't have any questions about any of the specific cases that you presented on in your thorough report. For me, it was mostly about what I appreciate having you all with us. One of the many things is that you were able to provide knowledge about national trends, things that are happening all departments may be facing with, like we've previously discussed the use of AI in reports. And you've provided some recommendations for that. And I hope that you continue to provide those recommendations wherever needed. And, of course, the use, you know, the growing concern around surveillance technology, things like the real-time cram center and the use of flock cameras, I think, can have very, very big pros and also very, very big cons. And I think that's sort of where the tension is that we're hearing from community members on, right? The folks who... feel a little bit safer because the real-time crime center has been able to catch folks involved in pedestrian deaths or whatever the case, right? And on the other hand, the very real growing concerns of over-surveillance, particularly of certain communities, and so I... Is there, have you seen any sort of model policy across the country in any municipalities that I've been using? You know, I think there's like a growing push to get flock cameras out of municipalities. You know, I don't trust flock, but I also don't trust Axios or whatever the other options are. And so have you seen any sort of model policies that have been able to build guardrails that you would be able to share with us, and is that within the scope of what you can do for us?

Thank you, Council Member Bencomo, and funny you should ask, this is a very hot topic in California. Certainly there is a lot of sort of legal guardrails in place as to when data sharing can or should occur, in particular with respect to federal agents, right? And so we're seeing how does that data sharing happen, where is it the responsibility of the vendor, which clearly has abdicated responsibility in some cases, and where is it the responsibility of the agency using it? We have taken the stance that it is ultimately a best practice for that agency to take ownership and so we're seeing a lot of shifts in California. One of the ways that agencies are managing this is to actually go in line by line with their flock contract and determine where the data should live. Is the data the responsibility of the department itself or does it live with FLOC? How does that affect that interagency operability with those systems? Is it even useful at that point if it only lives in unique agencies? So that's one place that we've been seeing some trends in that direction. The second is with boards of supervisors or with councils such as yourself creating and monitoring surveillance use policies. So whether that is a surveillance use policy that is covering all of the various types of surveillance cases that are within the city, or whether it's specific to unique technologies. Those can be drafted up. We've certainly worked with municipalities in California to help draft those. And really what we're looking at are balancing the use cases very explicitly and the protections that need to be in place. So retention policy, data sharing, what are MOUs that are happening with data sharing, Who gets to have access? Is it everybody? Is it certain users? Are there supervisor guard rails that need to be in place? And then our work, of course, is to come in on the back end with audits of that. So if you do have those policies in place, how frequently are you auditing? Are you auditing only your use and searches, or are you auditing the searches that are happening of your data by other jurisdictions? What does that look like? And so we're really starting to build that model policy, definitely with all of our agencies in California, and very happy to share out with you all.

That would be excellent. New Mexico is also really taking this on very seriously. And we have as well, even in our welcoming city resolution, we have a piece about auditing. And even though I think folks felt like it was a lot of layers of work, it also feels very important in the oversight and accountability and ownership of auditing. us saying we're going to use this data, then let's take ownership about what it means to be responsible stewards. So I would appreciate anything you can share.

Thank you. We absolutely will, yes.

And then really the last thing I wanted to cover was the recommendation that you have around the cadre. And you said the recommendation you provided is to have all officer-involved shootings be covered by the cadre. And then, yes, I also wanted to thank Chief for sharing the National Policing Institute's assessment and they also provided some great recommendations on there so I don't know if you've seen those and I all of them are very good but two of them particularly stood out to me as important so I would love to hear from you and chief on those recommendations chief the cadre they suggested and then the other two on here are the monthly body cam reviews with the supervisor and then the call preparation protocol for the more challenging interactions, which was where the report showed some more of that erosion of trust, even though I think the report did provide a really, really, honestly, a lot of great insights on things that we should just keep doing, the department is doing well, and then the places where growth can happen.

Anyway, so I'll start there on the recommendations.

mayor councilman como i'll start with that first one on the recommendation for the cadre we had a lengthy discussion the other day about this i in a perfect world i absolutely agree with them i don't think it's an unreasonable recommendation and i wish that it was as easy as me just saying yes the reality is those incidents are reviewed more than any other incident is already they go through multiple levels of review that are thorough And the cadre is not a full-time staff. That's an ancillary duty. They have another job, and then they probably have five or six other jobs on top of that that are ancillary duties. So I have to be very thoughtful in what cases get reviewed and to make sure that there's a purpose that is not being accomplished already by some other mechanism. And in this case, I think it is already being accomplished, and it becomes a check the box to me. The compromise that we came up with, which I think is a good compromise, is to do a training and equipment debrief for every officer involved shooting, even if it doesn't appear to be anything on its face. And that happens a lot earlier. So then we're looking for major things, whether they're training implications or equipment failures, that we can address right away as these review processes are carried out, the criminal and the administrative, that are already going to occur. So hopefully that answers it. It's not that I don't agree with it, it's just logistically it's very difficult to do that for every critical incident. I'd rather focus on those lower level uses of force that have questions and let them spend their time reviewing those so we can address those. On the recommendations from the MPI report, well a couple things. One, there's some good recommendations that we can use to tailor communication training or de-escalation training, whatever you want to call it, so that we're actually working on the things that appear to be the things that need to be addressed. The monthly body camera reviews are already happening. Now they don't have that information because that's not part of their assessment. Through Axon, there's Axon Performance which randomly assigns two body camera videos that are non-use of force related to each supervisor for their squad, every member of their squad to review. And then it tracks whether or not they've done it. There's pros and cons to that. Those are random reviews. So your chances of finding one, that's problematic because it's a very small percentage of all interactions as was just demonstrated by that report. are very low. The system they're using for that MPI report is a system that essentially would do the work of finding the ones, the interactions that are potentially problematic, or they do a great job on both sides of that spectrum. So it's something I would like to explore in the future is actually purchasing that system, because then the supervisor goes into their person, they look at their videos, this one's flagged red that it didn't go so well. They can go to the video, they can go right to the point where it starts to go downhill, they can see what led to that, maybe the officer did nothing wrong. or maybe they could have done better on how they communicated. And so that allows them to actually address potentially concerning things, especially from a training standpoint. And then on the flip side, they can also go in and see, they did a phenomenal job, we would have never known about how they treated this person if I wouldn't have gone in and saw that this one was flagged as exceptional, and then potentially put them in for accommodation or an award. I think that would be a better system and that's kind of what they're recommending, but what we're doing already kind of fits that. And then, I'm sorry, what was the second recommendation that you mentioned from the report?

The other one that stood out to me was a call preparation protocol for the most challenging calls. Let me look for it and I'll read to you what it says. In case you don't remember, there's a big report. But now I have to find it.

I remember generally what it was, counselor, but the wording might. So it's like a checklist, and I'm not against checklists, although pilots use checklists from the time they're a brand new pilot till 40, 50 years being a pilot. Planes are a lot more predictable than people. So using a checklist for policing is not nearly as useful in my opinion as it is for a pilot or someone who works on an assembly line or an engineer. They still have some utility if they're done correctly. I think one of the things they sent me was a supplement that I did not send to you all on interacting, dealing with those calls where the person is highly intoxicated or under the influence of something else. And again, if you look at those recommendations, some of them fit, some of them don't, depending on the circumstances. It depends, unfortunately, is how policing is. I'd rather tailor a training to where it teaches officers to use critical thinking skills. It gives them some tools to help them maybe be more efficient in how they analyze those interactions. But there are no black and white answers in policing. And so it's not if this, then do that. It's getting the officer to be able to recognize things make an appropriate decision based on what they're taking in and if you change one factor on a situation it could change everything so that's why i don't like the checklist i don't think the recommendation is wrong i just think it's you have to be careful how you implement it thanks chief um i'll spend a little bit more time on these and send you some questions um that's it for me though thank you very much counselor harris

Thanks, Mayor, and thank you all for the presentation. Some of my questions have already been answered, so I think a future discussion about surveillance and your input on some policies would be greatly appreciated. I was just talking with Sergio this morning about some things we could do also. So with that said, I guess I have two questions remaining on my list. One is maybe for internal audit. We got earlier in this year a couple batches of the memos that they send out and haven't seen those since February. So I was wondering if that is a plan that we would get those in a little more regular fashion rather than a quarterly or half a year update. So, I guess, thoughts on that?

Mr. Mayor, Councilor, Viola-Perea, for the record, that portion of the OIR group's scope of work was removed from this more recent contract that we implemented. We did expand the amount of cases, the case types that were going to be reviewed, but the individual reviews are no longer going to take place.

OK, that's good to know. And then my other question slash comment, which I think I made last time as well, is when we were talking about the geography distribution of things. So I appreciate that you brought up the fact that the internal investigations are always pegged to the department, which is not that helpful geography-wise. But I was wondering if we could get some insights maybe on where the incident took place. So if there's an internal complaint that this stop was handled poorly or there was use of force, we know that that didn't happen at the police department. We know that that happened somewhere else in the city. And so if we could maybe get information on where that happened. And then likewise, the zip codes are still maybe not that useful as a measure, just because in this city specifically, 88005 covers a wide swath of town and so it's not very, the demographics of 88005 of 88011 vary substantially and so that kind of makes that level of analysis a little less useful. So maybe going forward we could break it down tighter by census tract or something else, thanks.

yeah thank you for those questions council member is it harris or james harris just harris okay thank you uh... so first i just want a point of clarification uh... with relation to the memos the individual case memos so i just want to clarify we are reviewing individual cases and what you see in this report is at the end there's an appendix that has all of the cases sort of summarized it's a higher level summary than we used to do so we're not doing those lengthy individual case memos but we are reviewing every case so just for clarification in case anyone got concerned that we're not doing individual case reviews we certainly are still doing that Absolutely agree on the zip codes. We have been challenged with this portion of our scope of work since it started and on how to best present the data to you all because we are somewhat limited by the fact that the address is listed there and so we can certainly attempt to dig in more into that on a quarterly basis to provide more nuanced information and be able to report back out to you in the next quarterly report.

Is that something that maybe PD could assist with? So when they get this complaint, that they could attach that information to the case instead of you having to... Because I'm sure they would know offhand and might be able to provide that.

Mayor and Councilor Harrison, I'm kind of thinking as I'm talking. They know exactly where it happened, so they have all the information, including the address, wherever the stop or the incident happened. It's how do you translate that into something that's not identifying the people involved but it's still a usable metric other than zip code and I'm not sure what the best solution is but I agree with what you're saying it's not very useful the way it is and we can work out something to be able to provide something more nuanced perhaps and and it might even

Again, just thinking, speaking as I'm thinking, we may interact with your offices as well to kind of get a sense of what the community looks like and because we are not present here, just to make sure that we're not making any assumptions based on data that are not the as lived experience as you all know it.

Yeah, that'd be great, thanks. That's all I got, Mayor.

Mayor Pro Tem.

Thank you, Mayor. Teresa, Stephen, thank you very much for putting this together. Chief Story and the Police Department, thank you for cooperating through the process. You mentioned, and I'm encouraged that you were looking at race and ethnicity, and that was balanced, a good balanced approach. I was wondering what are your thoughts on drilling down a little bit deeper and looking at things like sexual orientation, gender, or age as well when you're looking at that mixed. I know that you mentioned perception and customer service as well. And sometimes we all have a different frame, and I think it's important to consider those as well.

yeah thank you mayor pro tem and absolutely valid to see how these play out across all kinds of different breakdowns i think one of the things that we are cautious of is that our sample size is very small so we take great care not to extrapolate decisions or conclusions about how this police department interacts with its community based on nine ten twenty and so we want to be cautious. We can certainly dig into the data and provide those figures insofar as they're not identifying individuals, but we also do want to be careful about the conclusions that might be drawn about disproportionality and so forth.

And just to add to that, and again, thank you for the question. One of the things that we can do, because I appreciate the sensitivity that I think you're driving at, is if we do see any kind of a trend, even in our small sample size, that's something that we will call out and talk to the department about. We've had situations in the past where a noticeable number of cases all revolved around this same issue, whether it was civil standbys or something that the department was bumping up against people in a problematic way. If we saw something related to the nature of the complainant that kind of jumped out over the course of a few cases, that would be something we'd be interested in and would work with.

Appreciate your looking into it and the sensitivity. Another piece to look at is as our relationship continues, maybe there is a three-year or five-year sample size where you could extrapolate a little bit more on that as well. So something to consider. Thank you, Mayor.

Yep, we're good. I think there's a member of the public that wanted to share something, if you want to come up.

Thank you very much, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members. I'm coming because it was real hard to find the OIR report.

Can you state your name? Oh, excuse me, Dan Romero.

Las Cruces resident. It's hard to find the original contract for OIR. I don't know if it's a yearly contract or it started off as three to five year contract. Looking at the OIR website, they show 49 agencies. Las Cruces Police Department is one, is the only one that report so far this year. Looking at the 2025 reporting, there were five agencies that had police oversight. One city had a police pursuit report, and one city reported on the military equipment. So it seems like OIR is a small shop, boutique shop. There was, and the other thing is looking at the website, there was two reports, so this is the ninth report so far. The eighth report was okay. The seventh and sixth report were the same report. for the year 2024. So their seventh report on their website is showing as the same report as the sixth report. So that needs to be corrected for people like myself that want to find the reports. In the sixth report, or maybe it was the eighth report, there was a discussion of two cases of an employee hotline reports. And I thought that was awfully odd that OIR would choose to report on a hotline, employee hotline cases. What it does is, you know, employee hotlines are very important for cities. It allows employees to talk about their supervisors or incident. And I thought it was really critical and bad taste that OIR decided to report on that. It's a small department, it's easy to out whoever did the reporting or whoever the complainant was. I also saw the same type of thing that's occurring right now with what's going on with the CAT 3 reporting. I think it's not a good use of their resources. Does OIR use AI to go over the reports? That would be important for us to know whether we're getting their actual opinion or something that's artificial. How many other law agencies that OIR is using right now is actually using category three as a reviews? When we're talking about zip codes, neighborhoods, everybody lives in a neighborhood, that might be the easiest way to report. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Viola.

Thank you Mr. Mayor, Councilors, Viola Perea for the record. This, just for clarification purposes, this is the OIR group's tenth semiannual report. The previous nine reports have been posted on the city's transparency page. The public can look under the audit page and you can access all nine reports and any attachments that were provided for those reports to support the findings on there. Also for clarification, the OIR group's contract, excuse me, is a five-year contract. It's an annual contract with four annual renewals, so the contract continues on for a five-year period. We just renewed them for a second five-year period that was effective this March. So they will be on board for that next or an additional five-year period. As far as the hotline complaints, by ordinance, neither internal audit nor the inspector general reviews any complaints, excuse me, that come through regarding LCPD or the fire department. So any complaints that come through the hotline that do involve a PD employee, whether it's an officer or civilian, those are automatically forwarded over to the police department for investigation. And then those hotline complaints, per their contract, are forwarded to the OIR group for review. So that will be a common practice if anything does come through the hotline regarding a police officer. Any other questions?

Thank you, Viola. Any questions? Anything else? No. Again, thank you for your presentation. Just want to say thank you to Chief Story and the Las Cruces Police Department for embracing the audit. You know, that's how you can grow and develop and learn and get the best practices out there. And just you mentioned the CALEA accreditation. Well, we're proud and we're very happy to say that the Las Cruces Police Department has been awarded the accreditation, and we're happy to announce that. Congratulations, Chief and the department. Thank you. Okay, with that, that was the only item we had for today, so a motion to adjourn.

Move to adjourn. Second.

This is on the motion to adjourn the work session. Councillor McClure? Yes. Councillor Matisse is absent. Councillor Harris? Yes. Councillor Bencomo? Yes. Councillor Curran? Yes. Councillor Munoz? Yes. And Mayor?

Yeah.