Lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, and bean counters across New Mexico all have an interest in what happened on the streets of Santa Fe in the past month.
The accumulation of gunfights in the area involving officers – some fatal, most in typical, narrow-minded secrecy that almost always does no favors to the people whose lips are closed – is likely to have repercussions beyond the direct Involved.
The reason? New Mexico’s just-unpacked Civil Rights Act.
The new law, which allows individuals to file lawsuits against government agencies in state courts if they believe their civil rights have been violated, went into effect July 1. It has a multitude of facets, most of them intriguing, but two important provisions are: It removes “qualified immunity” as legal defense for individual government employees such as police officers and limits the damages to $ 2 million each government agency must pay.
We have no idea how the investigation into the four police shootings that took place between June 23rd and July 7th will turn out. We know that most investigations – more like findings – are mostly in favor of the officers who fired their weapons.
The new law is not retroactive to anything that happened before July 1, which technically means the controversial fatal shooting of suspect Nathan Roybal by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office on May 23.
But the shootings of Roybal, and perhaps others, regardless of the date, will almost certainly have an impact in the offices of human resources specialists who work for government agencies. With qualified immunity gone and state courts being seen as an easier way than federal courts to prosecute civil rights violations, it is reasonable to assume that bureaucrats might be forced to scrutinize who’s on the government’s payroll well in advance of an incident.
That said, a potential employee with a past – such as a cop who was involved in a previous shootout – may no longer be the slam dunk clerk they once were.
In the Roybal case, one of the Santa Fe County MPs named in the incident is Leonardo Guzman, who was involved in a fatal shootout in 2017 as an employee of the Santa Fe Police Department.
Guzman shot a suspected car thief near Eldorado. He was later acquitted by a district attorney’s office.
Again, we don’t know enough to determine whether the June shooting at Roybal was warranted. Once an investigation into this and the other incidents is completed, it will be forwarded to the prosecutor. In recent years, such cases have been moved to a group of prosecutors from elsewhere – like the Guzman case in ’17 – to make a decision on whether to prosecute officials.
What we do know is this: The New Mexico State Police’s public whispers investigating the incident were incomplete at best. All we have so far is video that was first obtained from KRQE-TV. I think you can assume that it will be searched by lawyers.
But what fascinates me about the Roybal case and others that followed is not just how it is investigated and decided. This is how they are interpreted, especially against the background of the Civil Rights Act.
One other thing to note: there is plenty of anecdotal evidence pointing to the wandering of law enforcement, where officials and proxies move from one agency to another, sometimes due to controversy. In a world where there are not enough cops, cross-transfers are common.
When the law was first proposed in the legislature, especially in its early versions, I had serious concerns. Some still remain. A verdict against a small town – and let’s face it, most New Mexico local governments are tiny – could be devastating. For example, could De Baca County handle a $ 2 million ruling against one of its employees? Could Santa Fe County?
On the other hand, the real value of a law is not shown in the courtroom but in everyday life. And that’s what’s interesting about the Civil Rights Act when it comes to government employees. When attorney Richard Rosenstock states, as he did in an interview with this newspaper earlier this month, that “there are many New Mexico government officials who are not cops,” he is absolutely right. Cops aren’t the only ones checked, just the first.
From now on, the government has to be more selective about who to hire.
Is it good? Yes it is.
Phill Casaus is the editor of The New Mexican.
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