Minding Your Business; 360; Jaime G. Chavez

Minding your business is provided by support from Seal Levitino of Emerick Realtors, proud to be associated with the quality programs and community service projects of PBS and KRWG TV. By Camino Real Builders, a committed partner with KRWG Broadcasting, providing educational, informative and entertaining programs to our region. And by the New Mexico Humanities Council, working with local groups to bring programs about culture and the human experience to all communities in New Mexico. KRWG TV presents Minding Your Business, a look at the people, places, events and issues that impact the business and economy of Southwest New Mexico, with your host, Charles Comer.

Hello and welcome to Minding Your Business, a show where we explore business, economic development, community resources and issues that impact our region. This week on Minding Your Business, anyone who works or attends class at New Mexico State University knows it has everything a small city has. In fact, if NMSU was a municipality, it would be the eighth largest city in New Mexico. It even has its own police force. And that is something that is a little bit misunderstood by many, but here to help change that is NMSU Police Chief Jaime Chavez. Chief Chavez, thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So as is tradition, let's let's start out to find a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, where you went to school and perhaps maybe even a little bit about not only how you ended up at NMSU as as police chief, but your your your background in law enforcement Well, I'm a native of this area. I was born here in in Los Cruces. I attended public school here,

and I'm a graduate of NMSU. I started my law enforcement career in 1981, shortly after receiving my associate's degree in police science back then. I started out in the little town of Mesilla as deputy marshal, and I also did a little stint with the doignan accounting jail, and then I was hired here in 1981 as a patrol officer, and then I've worked my way up through the ranks. And so you've had some experience with smaller law enforcement agencies, and but NMSU Police, that's that's considerably bigger than than the marshal's office in Mesilla, isn't it? Well, certainly it is. If you add the daytime populations of this campus, and that's the way we like to look at the numbers, we approach between 27 and 29,000 people on this campus daily during normal operations. So that makes us a pretty large community. Out of curiosity, because I'm I'm pretty much a hometown boy, where'd you go to junior high in high school?

It was core junior high? Oh, absolutely. I remember it in downtown area, and then I went to Maple. Oh, okay. And so just to let folks know, I went to Zia junior high and and graduated cruises. 1982, a year after you started your your law enforcement career. So you're here to talk about NMSU Police, to spell some myths, talk about some community outreach. So let's start by finding out some about the history of the department. Well, the department started in 1955 as the community started to grow. There was a need for a dedicated law enforcement and Deputy Sheriff coming out of Donjana County named Art Marcus, came on board. In 1955 and started immediately with five officers to augment the force. And that grew rapidly. And that was the start of the NMSU Police. And it's grown to keep up somewhat with the populations. And we're now

on our seventh chief, which that would be me. There has been quite a variety of different backgrounds in the chiefs that have come through here. The last two have been natives, so to speak, started their careers here and in our ending our careers here. Now, I know a person who had a long and illustrious career with NMSU went on to do national training and stuff. How often does that happen that you have officers that start their career, finish their career, work their full 20 or 25? It doesn't happen very frequently. We have officers that start here and are attracted to other places or want to go to a bigger department for different opportunities. So it's actually fairly rare that we have somebody that works on entire career here. So you're used to sort of that stepping stone atmosphere sometimes? Unfortunately, yes, we are used to that. We're trying to track more people that would make this

an entire career. Tell me how you guys are funded. I know with our station here, we're a line item on the legislature. How about you folks? We are also funded through the General Fund, through the legislature. We rely on that completely. There's a few grant opportunities and a few other small funding sources, but primarily it's legislative. Over the years, has the legislature been good to increase your budget as needed for additional officers and additional force? Or has that been a struggle for you guys? It's been a struggle and at times it has been stagnant, but recently we've moved on through a different process and we're seeing a growth now. I think NMSU, just since I finished school in 1999, a late-comer to school, I think NMSU has grown by more than 5,000 students, which means more support staff and things like that,

and more police work for you folks. Tell us a little bit about the NMSU police. How many officers, patrol units, that kind of stuff, and then we'll talk a little bit more about some folks you have that are specially trained. Great. We're a fully service police department. We have patrol officers, we have investigators, and we have people that are involved in crime prevention and other outreach groups. We currently have 22 patrol positions, sorry, 22 staff total, some are assigned to patrol. Currently we have 14 officers assigned to patrol, and then we have the investigators that deal with the continuing investigations that result from the patrol work. We currently have two canine units that assist patrol division. One is a explosive dog, and the other one is a narcotics dog. Now we'll take a look at those. Now a huge problem is recruiting for law enforcement

agencies across the nation. Sounds like you're working to combat that. What are you folks doing to help recruit officers? We're trying to target areas outside of this community, recruiting on an national level. Use of the internet. Here recently we have aggressively posted on a website, and we're receiving quite a bit of request for information from servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan who are looking forward to coming back and wanting to locate them to this area. I know a good friend of mine, when he got out of the military, he started working for a city PD. He actually is a real estate agent, now that's a long story. I accidentally shot himself twice in the foot, but we won't mention his name. But so where are your officers trained? Our officers go to the New Mexico law enforcement training academy in Santa Fe, and they receive their 22 and a half weeks of training there,

just like any other police officer who is certified in the state. That's a lot longer than boot camp, isn't it? Isn't boot camp, isn't it like 16 weeks? That's 22, boy, and it's very military style, isn't it? Tell us a little bit about training camp. It is paramilitary in nature. They do receive, in addition to the exciting stuff about police work, the PT training and the firearms and driving. They do academic courses. They have to learn about the legal aspects of law enforcement, as well as dealing with the public in a non-aggressive fashion, or depending on the situation, aggressive. Now, a big thing that helps with recruiting, I know, is good pay, good benefits. How do you guys stack up to some of the other local agencies around here? Well, in the recent past, we weren't stacking up too well. We were a little bit behind, but there's been an aggressive response from the administration to address that problem, so we have a very competitive

process now and also a compensation package, and we're targeting retirees. We are now over at $51,000 a year to target those persons who are retiring from law enforcement, and wish to continue their service. So, I feel real comfortable now that we'll be able to attract some quality people. Like you say, it sounds like we're going to have a good labor pool from people finishing in Iraq coming back home, and I know finding a job state so I can be really tough for soldiers. Did you do any time in the military? No, I have not. I was an army brat, so I certainly can't claim to, but I know the challenge is those kind of families face. Now, as a law enforcement agency, what do you feel is your greatest resource? Just like every other organization, that's our people. The people who have decided to be police officers and are dedicated to that and have to put up with what it takes to be a cop. You know, the long hours, the court dates on your days off, the additional training and certification,

as well as some of the negative sides of law enforcement. Now, let's talk a little bit about misconceptions, and then we'll go into finding out a little bit more about the departments, some specially trained units, and the like, I know one common misconception is your area of jurisdiction. Most people assume it's just the boundaries of the main campus of New Mexico, State University. Let's start with that misconception, and if you have any others, let's talk about it. Well, that certainly is one that we do have a confined area here, which is the main campus property, where most of the academic buildings are located, and there is a misconception that we can't stray outside of those boundaries. But additionally, we have a lot of property that NMSU owns, which involves areas outside of this main campus, up to 160 square miles of territory, so those fall within our jurisdiction. Sometime back, though, we entered into a mutual

aid agreement with the Dalyana County Sheriff, and the Los Cruces Police Department, and that mutual aid agreement was actually signed by the governor at the time, and what we're doing is we're sharing power, and we have had that in place for quite some time. That allows NMSU police to go anywhere in Dalyana County and perform any law enforcement services that we're called upon to do, and it also allows the city and the county to come on the campus to perform any functions they need to do. What does that do for the department just PR-wise, getting out there, getting outside the boundaries, and doing good? We're going to get into an example of that here in just a minute, but that's got to be great for PR, got to be good for the officers, and the understanding by other agencies of your department. Does it help? Well, it certainly helps on the basic level. It gets law enforcement together where the departments work and they're they're used to working together, and they know the personnel in each other's jurisdiction.

And the other aspect of it is that we do go out into the community and do programs, sponsor through NMSU, NMSU police, in various locations, including throughout the state. Now, I think we're just about ready for that video, and we'll give the production people time to roll it. Well, they say they're ready to roll it. Why don't you take a look at the monitor, and let's talk through some of the stuff we see here. What are we looking at? That's a SWAT team, isn't it? Well, the NMSU police has a sign personnel to the Dauyanne County SWAT team, and that's in an effort to allow us to have team members on the team so that we can integrate with them in case we need to them on campus, and also to augment the Dauyanne County Sheriff, because at times they may also have limited resources and will like the supply personnel. Now, I see that guy is repelling face down. I've only seen that in movies. You have someone on your force who can do that. They call it Aussie style?

Aussie style, yes. There's several of the people in the department that can do that. Now, what are we seeing in this video? We're seeing here as a depiction of an active shooter, somebody moving through an academic building, firing a weapon at, and the response that the officers would perform, and in reaction to that, they're carrying a body bunker and specialized weapons to enter into the academic area where the problem is going. So that's really high end, almost like Navy SEAL kind of stuff, isn't it? Well, the current training for active shooter is, is not to wait for a SWAT team or a specialized unit to allow the officers who are on patrol to immediately address the problem. Now, we see a couple good-looking dogs. There are a couple good-looking guys. What you got there? We've got Real and Mickey. We have a narcotics dog, and we also have an explosive dog. Both fairly new to the department. They augment us, allow us to search for explosives in our activity centers, basketball arena, football arena, and just to provide another measure

of safety to our campus. Now, I understand this is a rescued animal. This is rescued dog. Tell us about that. Yes, this is Belle. She's only been with the department a few days. She was at the shelter, and we were contacted by a civilian who said, I think this dog might be good for you, or a master canine handler who evaluated the dog, performed some tests there at that residence, and found out that it could be a good police dog in the area of explosives. So we returned the dog back to the shelter, and it was donated to NMSU. About how long for an untrained dog, but how long does it take to train a dog for something that specialized like sniffing bombs? That's out of my area of expertise, that's why. Is it, but my guess is it takes just an incredible amount of patience and trust between the animal and the trainer. Takes a lot of hours, and that's why we identified Andrew Bowen. He has a love for that type of training for the dogs,

and he has been certified and sent to all the training to become that master trainer. Now, now we're getting into interdepartmental, you know, mutual aid agreements. We're looking at an old shot of a bad, bad thing happened north county, the hatch floods. Now tell me about your folks in involvement, NMSU police involvement in that. Well, because we work very closely with all agencies, and including the offices of emergency management, we were called upon to provide assistance for the hatch flooding, and we sent not only police officers, but the communications personnel to assist in the entire process. Now, I understand your communications personnel were the first there, the first communications people in the county to get there. Yes. And how does that feel to know to be a first responder? That's got to feel good. Well, actually, this area, we're very fortunate that law enforcement here all works together, and we've had trainers from

across the country come and do seminars here and things of that nature, and they're constantly surprised that we just work together here. There's no big green over whose territory it is or whose line it is. We all seem to just get the job done. Now, what are we looking at here? Those people looks like they're handling guns? Yes, they are. That's part of an administrative day at the range, and that's the official title of the program is an introduction to deadly forms, and that's the program we developed here at the department to allow people from the community, from the campus, faculty, staff, or other members of the Lasker's community to come on and take part in some training on how police officers are trained. The process is necessary to deploy deadly force, what's required legally, and then they get a taste of actually handling firearms, to include service pistols, patrol rifles, and a couple of submachine guns. You know, I for some reason when I was looking through the folder and putting this video together

for you, I couldn't find that great shot with the little short submachine gun. Now, we've got a girl actually out there doing it. Looks like she's flinching a little bit. What's, and is this administrative day as well, or it's something different, isn't it? That is the administrative day at the range that young lady is firing a duty weapon assigned to the NMSU police, be a Glock pistol, and she's firing a couple shots to become familiar with the weapon. I don't know a darn thing about guns, but a friend of mine says Glock's the best sign arm for a police officer. He actually works in law enforcement, but not as an actual officer. Now, what do we see here? That is one of our real popular programs. It's kind of unique to this area that is rad kids, resist aggression defensively, and that's a program for children between the ages of five and 12. And what we're trying to do is develop their instinctual skills to resist

an abduction or a molestation, and it's a dynamic program where we, not only through electoral demonstration and children activities, but we actually have at the end of the program, these kids will actually learn how to defend themselves against somebody trying to abduct them, actually using defensive skills as you see here. We have a police officer dressed as an aggressor, and a child going to demonstrate some of her skills that she's learned during the training. So you actually teach kids how they can defend themselves and at least get away from a potential abductor twice their size. Absolutely, and it's a program that's proven in the United States. There's been 39 saves of children who have actually gone through the training. 39 times have demonstrated that it can and will work. And that's amazing. Now, we see they look like they're finishing up class and getting a certificate there. And so we've come to the end of the video, but

why, you know, you work on such a limited budget, why do stuff like that? Why do rad kids, firearms, training, and teach people the very specific guidelines that police officers have to follow for use of deadly force? Well, basically because we are part of this community, and the community is us. We live here, and in order for us to do our jobs, we have to involve the community. Not only do we have to teach them about who we are and what we do so that they understand us, but they also need to learn how to protect themselves and be aware of their environments so that they can protect themselves and or call us to do that together. Now, you said police forces aren't really super common amongst universities. I'm sure some of the larger ones. What kind of challenges does that make you face? Being such a small entity, you almost, while you're a very public organization, you work in a very quiet form sort of in the

background. Is that a challenge? Is that tough? You know, most law enforcement agencies are on TV, they're up front. You guys run in the background. Is that tough to do? Not necessarily, but you're correct. We do work on the on the sidelines. We're not in a community where there's a lot of violence or a lot of over crime. So we do work in a subdued fashion and try to keep this the campus make it conducive to higher education. You want to be a setting that allows that to happen. So there are some challenges in that respect, but it's just like any other municipality, except our clientele is different. We're working with students, younger students, and we're also working with faculty. So that changes the demographics of the daytime population. Now, you had said something about having to work sort of, you used a bottom-up

top-down sort of description comparing you to say the city police here. Do you remember what we talked about there? What I was talking about is that normally in a municipality, like Las Cruces, you're going to have at the top a city manager in a mayor, and then pretty close on that pyramid, you're going to have the fire chief and the police chief. And in a municipality, the largest portions of the budget goes to those two entities. And on a campus, because we're academic-oriented, that's not necessarily where the police and emergency services fit. Now, I could come up with a hundred more follow-up questions and just keep talking to you and talking to you, but I hope you'd like to come back sometime, especially when you got some big things going on. You want to come and talk about on TV? Certainly, absolutely. Sincerely, appreciate you coming on, Chief Thomas. Thank you.

Well, it's time again for a weekly piece here on Mining Your Business. It showcases some of the hardworking entrepreneurs and business people in our area. We call it the Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce, Local Business Feature. Okay, that's fine. You can pay for it when you pick it up that morning or that afternoon. We opened a store in the Valle Ball in February 1st, 1985. And we were there for 10 years, closed December 1995, and then we opened this store December 1st, 1990, and been here ever since. My wife, she's always loved working in the garden, doing, working with flowers and stuff, so basically it's her store, and she's the creative side,

and I'm the numbers guy, do the bookkeeping and orders and stuff like that. So it's worked out to be a very good partnership. We offer loose cut flowers that you can buy by the stem, or we offer arrangements. We have two reach-in colors, a ten-door and a four-door, which are always stocked with pressure arrangements. If you don't see anything there you like, our great designers can design and create something to your specifications. We offer roses, just about any flower that's in season. We also offer green plants, blooming plants, we do have gift goods, stuff to animals, we offer some candies. Flower ramen now? Oh, they are gorgeous. I mean they taste great. We do have a line of candles and other complementary items to our floral business. We offer delivery. We also offer wire services that if you want to send flowers to someone

outside of the Las Cruces area, we can send them just about anywhere you want. I live in Maui, right there. They only have one flower shop, that's fine. We pride ourselves on customer service, a good inventory of product, very reasonable prices. I'm real proud of our crew. They do an excellent job, and that makes it all worthwhile. That just about does it for this week. If you have a question or comment about the show, you can call the mind of your business hotline at 6467350 or email me at Charles Comer at Yahoo.com. Again, I'd like to thank my guest, NMSU Police Chief Jaime Chavez for coming on the show. And thank you so much for watching. I'm Charles Comer. Here's hoping you have a great one. Yeah, they'll check the tape real quick, and then you