"Internal Investigations and their findings are considered Personnel Matters and are not subject to public review."
Let's skip the discussion of random, quizzical capitalization and move straight to the cliche spawned from the above quotation, sent to SFR this week by Santa Fe Police Department spokesman Greg Gurule after we asked for records that would show whether officer Jeremy Bisagna has ever been disciplined by the department.
The cliche: Stop me if you've heard this one before.
We've written several times about the city's policy of keeping secret the fact of police officer discipline, most recently on July 24. At that time, city spokesman Matt Ross told SFR that newly hired City Attorney Erin McSherry would be happy to talk about the longstanding policy once she had engaged Mayor Alan Webber in a "serious and thorough" discussion about it.
That apparently hasn't happened. Instead, Ross tells SFR, McSherry wants to talk to Attorney General Hector Balderas, who has shelved a request from Webber's predecessor, Javier Gonzales, for an opinion on whether the secrecy policy complies with the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA).
Gonzales made the request a little more than 10 months ago.
A month and a half ago, Ross complained to SFR that McSherry had only been on the job a week and promised an interview once she'd reviewed the policy with the mayor.
Today, he wrote this in a response to questions: "We're continuing to take a look at this policy. We haven't heard back from the Attorney General's office yet. The new City Attorney Erin McSherry is following up with them, and we'll have more to say in the future."
Gurule's denial of SFR's IPRA request makes clear that the policy remains unchanged — the city is not willing to cough up any records that would show whether Bisagna has ever been in trouble for on- or off-duty conduct before. During a SWAT callout last year, he emptied his magazine into a South Santa Fe apartment, killing a man who was living with mental illness in one of the most controversial police shootings in city history.
Additionally, the word "personnel" appears three times in the IPRA statute itself and 24 times total in the AG's IPRA Compliance Guide, which is meant to help government entities release as much information as possible to the public. "Personnel matters" is not among the listed legal reasons for withholding records.
Based on the amount of time that's passed since Webber's administration told SFR it plans to carefully review the secrecy policy, it's not a priority for Santa Fe's new alcalde and his legal team. Other departments in the state, including in Albuquerque, routinely release such information.
The secrecy policy makes it impossible for anyone to know whether the department has determined Bisagna followed policy when he shot Anthony Benavidez on July 19, 2017.
