Photo Courtesy SFPD Facebook
Michele Williams thought one day she would apply for the position of police chief and maybe even get selected for the job. She had already climbed her way through the ranks in the Santa Fe Police Department during her nearly 20 years on the force to become a field lieutenant—the highest ranking female officer on the roster from that time until her retirement this past spring.
Yet, for the last eight months of her employment, she was not involved in law enforcement activities, included in staff meetings or even listed on the roster.
Williams alleges that's because when she complained about suspected timecard fraud by a commanding officer, she was moved to a desk job that didn't exist before she was assigned to it. Later, when Williams suspected problems in accounting for weapons collected in a gun-violence-prevention program, she was targeted with an investigation into her own conduct, according to documents submitted to the court as exhibits.
The claims are detailed in a lawsuit she filed Friday, Dec. 11 in the First Judicial District Court.
Williams worked as a Santa Fe cop from April 2001 until April of this year, when she officially retired after paying into a program that allows individuals to retire before they are otherwise eligible to collect retirement benefits. That choice was "unplanned and undesired," according to the lawsuit, but Williams did so because her career with SFPD had "constructively come to an end following her communications concerning improper, if not unlawful, conduct by personnel employed by her employer."
In the court filing, attorney Thomas Grover argues that the City of Santa Fe and Mayor Alan Webber violated the Whistleblower Protection Act when they retaliated against Williams.
Further, the lawsuit says Webber "was overheard at a city event stating that SFPD needed to 'deal with Williams' or words to that effect" and that the statement was "meant to render an adverse action upon Ms. Williams or otherwise discharge her from her position with SFPD."
Williams tells SFR in an interview that she recently completed her masters degree in industrial organizational psychology and has a new job as an administrator at a local private education institution.
She says she does not know whether she was targeted for personal reasons or simply because she raised an alarm.
"I don't know if it was because of me or or something that I did or whether it was just their adverse reaction to criticism," she says. "It's part of a larger cultural issue in law enforcement in Santa Fe and in New Mexico…and nationally, that law enforcement is not open to cultural readjusting of the ways in which they are deficient."
The first link in the chain of events that led to her departure from the police department appeared in December 2018. That's when Williams told the city manager she suspected her supervisor, Deputy Chief Robert Vazquez, had failed to report his absence from work on a payroll report a month earlier.
More than eight months later, in August 2019, Vazquez retired from the department. The same month, Williams claims she learned that the department's internal affairs team had cleared Vazquez in the matter and had reassigned her from her position as field lieutenant to an administrative job that paid less.
Then, in November 2019, she filed a second complaint about a problem she saw—this time guns that were missing or improperly labeled in the police evidence locker. A memo she wrote to Deputy Chief Ben Valdez outlined a discrepancy in records for two firearms stored by police after a gun-buyback event with New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence. While the department produced 133 guns that had been collected in July for destruction in November, two were unaccounted for, and the scope that had been mounted on a third had apparently been removed, Williams wrote.
The next day, the department notified her she was the target of an internal affairs investigation for, among other vague charges, "unbecoming conduct."
"With defendants having taken two retaliatory actions upon Ms. Williams for her reporting to her employer communications regarding improper, if not illegal, acts, Ms. Williams reasonably believed she had no future with the department," reads the lawsuit.
City spokesman Dave Herndon said the city typically declines to answer questions about pending litigation and noted the city attorney's office had not been served with the filing as of Monday afternoon.
The case is assigned to Judge Kathleen McGarry Ellenwood and Williams has requested a jury trial.
Meanwhile, Williams has already won a few rounds in court against the city. In May, state District Judge Bryan Biedscheid ruled that Santa Fe officials had violated the state Inspection of Public Records Act by withholding records Williams sought related to rape cases. That case is still pending, however, along with a second records case in which Williams is seeking documents about complaints made to the department. SFR has also sued the city over its refusal to make such complaints and their outcomes public.
