William Melhado
Chief Paul Joye speaks with reporters Thursday afternoon at police headquarters.
Santa Fe’s search for its next top cop concluded Thursday with the announcement that interim Chief Paul Joye will lead the city’s police department.
Chief Andrew Padilla retired in December, and city leaders began looking for his replacement.
Joye beat out the other finalist for the position, Andrew Rodriguez, deputy chief of the Rio Rancho Police Department. Joye and Rodriguez emerged from an initial pool of 10, after a series of community dialogues, meetings with city leaders and a livestreamed question-and-answer session.
During a news conference Thursday afternoon at police headquarters, City Manager John Blair, who led the search process, said the public frequently raised the question: “Do we want someone who’s going to blow things up and make this a whole new place, or do we want someone who knows everybody?”
“Chief Joye is the best of both of those worlds,” Blair said in response to reporters’ questions. “He’s got the buy-in from the team, from the people in the community and he’s got the ideas and willingness to bring that sort of change to the police department that will make Santa Fe’s police department the best in the state.”
Joye, who lives in Lamy according to his application, joined SFPD as a cadet in 2006 and was promoted to deputy chief in 2019. SFPD has been his only home in law enforcement. He hopes to build a community of support in the department that matches his own experience working his way up the ranks.
Joye said he plans to reduce turnover by “making our officers feel the way I felt my whole career here, that I was supported and cared about and that my opinions mattered.”
The department’s THRIVE program, a once-successful diversion program that laid the groundwork for similar initiatives across the state, has since fallen quiet as an alternative response to drug users, Joye tells SFR, “The plan is to incorporate THRIVE with [the Alternative Response Unit] to make it more broad and more accessible to the officers and more available to the community that we’re serving.”
The Alternative Response Unit, a collaboration of the Community Services and the Police and Fire departments, has case managers and EMS professionals respond to non-violent emergencies instead of police. Joye sees the success of this unit as an encouraging sign to build back the THRIVE program.
William Melhado
“When other officers heard that [Joye] was on the way to help them in a tough situation, they’d feel good because help was on the way,” said Mayor Alan Webber. “That’s leadership, that’s reassurance, that’s confidence and it’s a command of the situation that Chief Joye brings to his job and has through his career in this department.”
SFR asked Joye how the department plans to build trust with the community in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.
“At its best, when it’s functioning most appropriately, it’s not the job of the police department to tell the community what’s best for the community,” he said. “The relationship has to be the other way around.”
Joye explained his support for the reorganization of his department, which now falls under the Community Health and Safety Department: “It [has] me in direct contact with other stakeholders in the city to work together to solve the various issues and problems that we’re all facing.”
Webber also mentioned Joye’s support for the government reorganization that happened under his administration.
Joye immediately began his role as SFPD chief and will continue to be paid a salary of $57.78 an hour.
Next Wednesday, Joye tells SFR he’s participating for a second time in American Ninja Warrior, a game show in which participants attempt to complete an obstacle course. Joye says he first competed in 2015.
