Minding Your Business; 347; New Mexico State Police

MINDING YOUR BUSINESS IS PROVIDED BY SUPPORT FOUR From Seal Levitino of Emerick Realtors, proud to be associated with the quality programs and community service projects of PBS and K-R-W-G-TV. By Camino Real Builders, a committed partner with K-R-W-G 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. K-R-W-G-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, to show where we explore business politics and issues that impact our region. This week on MINDING YOUR BUSINESS, New Mexico is an expansive state, with some of the most important of our nation's highways running through it, but also countless smaller state and county roads that spider off into the most remote parts of the land of Enchantment. Keeping an eye on all of that, plus a lot more, is the job of the New Mexico State Police. Here to tell us the history of the agency and talk about its relationship with the community is Sergeant Alex Orcasitas from the Las Cruces Office. Alex, thanks so much for being here. You bet, thank you. As is tradition, let's start out by finding out a little bit about you, where you grew up, where you went to school, and how you ended up working for the state police. I guess I don't have a very lengthy history, but I did grow up here in Las Cruces. I'm a native Las Crucine. I went to school here, went to high school, graduated here. I'm also attended New Mexico State University.

Well just study. I studied electrical engineering. Wow. I did change majors, and I changed to a language major as a matter of fact. Really? Left college, and that's where I went into New Mexico State Police back in 1995. Now, I see you've got a wedding ring, so wife and kids? Yes, sir. How many kids? I have one daughter and a beautiful six-year-old girl. I remember those days, well, I have a daughter's just about to turn 20. Now, let's shift gears and tell us from your history to the history of New Mexico State Police. It was a crazy time. It was kind of turn of the century, wasn't it? And it genuinely was the Wild West. It was a little after the turn of the century. As you know, New Mexico became a state in 1912. We didn't have state police at that time. It wasn't until 1933 that we actually started what was called the New Mexico Mounted Patrol. And it was nine officers and one chief. They all went through the academy together.

And they were all assigned motorcycles. And the way they were originally assigned to their duty stations is they were assigned to stations that were highway department stations. So we had two in Santa Fe, two in Albuquerque, two in Los Cruces. I believe two in Raton. And I can't remember where the other two places were. So we had them spread out like that. So we did the first two years as the motor patrol. And then in 1935, obviously, we were quite busy. So we almost tripled in size, went up to about 40 officers, at which point they did away with the motorcycles, and went to marked police units, which looked very cool back in 1935, obviously. At that time, we didn't have radios. What we generally, the officer would do is they would drive into each town, and they would find the telephone operator in town and let her, him, know that they were in the area. And if there was anything going on to let them know about it. So the phone company was basically your substitute for radio in the early days?

They were somewhat of a dispatch, but again, that was very hit and missed because obviously we didn't have cell phones or any other sort of communication. So it was incumbent on the officers to call into the operator every now and then just to check on what was going on. And if they had anything that they needed to be assigned to. I can't even imagine what a traffic stop would be like without GPS and a car camera and cell phones and all of that. How would you feel in that day making a traffic stop? It's interesting, and I'll get in more into the history that later, but my grandfather was a state police officer too. So I think about some of the things, the challenges that they had back then, especially when we think about how nowadays, if we go to work and our computer doesn't work or we can't turn our computer on, we feel like we can't work. Well, you try and think back to those times and how they got along without air conditioning and everything else. So I think they did have some challenges. I think they overcame quite well. Sometimes the technology we've become a little bit too dependent upon it, but everything that we have now is quite helpful.

As far as technology speaking back with those old officers, the mid-40s is when we actually began having police radios in our units. And also what began happening in the 40s is we started phasing out the motorcycles. And we didn't have motorcycles again until the late 90s. And now we do have a pretty large contingent of motorcycles again. Out of curiosity, why did they do away with the motorcycles? I know one problem with it is if you have to apprehend someone, you can't take them to jail. You know, I don't know exactly why, but that was one of the challenges was not being able to transport anybody. So if you arrested somebody, you ended up tying up two officers because we've never had two officers per vehicle. So you tie up two officers for that plus bad weather. You can't ride those out in the bad weather. Because there's a lot of challenges, a lot of advantages to having them. The officers that do have those assigned now do have a regular marked police unit and they have a motorcycle that they can either trail or they can ride. And they get to wear those cool boots and the cool pants.

But I interrupted, we were in the middle of the history. So going back to the 40s, again, we phased out the motorcycle motorcycles. And of course, it was during World War II. So there were some different things going on during World War II. I spoke to our historian. He told me some interesting stories about the type of enforcement we had back then. Is there was a speed limit during World War II, but of course we had the rationing of rubber. We had the rationing of gasoline going on. The speed limit at that time was unenforceable. So what would happen is if a state police officer stops somebody who was speeding, they would actually notify those who were giving out the rationing stamps. And what would happen is if your name was on the list and you'd been caught speeding, you were considered to be wasting rubber so you wouldn't get your rationing stamps for gasoline. So that's the way the enforcement worked back then for some of the speeding laws that we had in the 40s. I imagine it was effective. I don't have any statistics on it, but I bet it was. And then again, we've evolved like other agencies through the 60s. Of course, the 60s, there was a lot of turmoil going on. The late 60s, LAPD came up with their SWAT team. They were the first agency to start that concept.

And in the mid 70s, New Mexico State Police also followed through on that concept. And we started a tactical team as well. We've had one of the worst prison riots in the country's history in Santa Fe. So our team was actually a big part of quelling that riot. So state police was very involved in getting those guys confined again. Yet as a matter of fact, we were restoring order. Yes, as a matter of fact, state police was a big part of that. And for a long time, we even had state police officers going through training to learn how to run the prisons to come in and work with the corrections officers and be a part of the prison staff for quite some time. More like a proactive approach to keep this from happening again. Now, fascinating history. Tell us some of the nuts and bolts of state police, both statewide and locally. Let's start with how many do they employ?

Just to give you a little bit of a breakdown of why state police works is we are under the Department of Public Safety. And within that Department of Public Safety, we have the motor transportation division. You've probably seen the gray cars that have the badge on the side. Oh, okay. What is commonly referred to as DOT officer. Correct. Those are those are the commercial motor vehicle officers. And then we also have our special investigations division, which are our the old ABC officers. They're the ones that do the liquor law enforcement and the gambling enforce. Okay. I was a bartender and I remember Mike Fritz. Okay. So those those were the the men and women that come in and they they are commission law enforcement officers. And they come in and they check on all the license liquor establishments in the states in the state. And they also do follow up investigation for us when we have DUIs where we start noticing a problem where we're picking up a lot of DUIs that are leaving a certain location. Okay. We can pass that on to them and they'll do follow up investigation into these establishments. See if we can try and curb that problem.

So we have so we have those three divisions and then we also have civilians that work for us. And New Mexico State Police obviously is under that whole umbrella. Overall, just within the law enforcement program, which are those different agencies that I just mentioned, we have about 1100 people. Out of those 1100, about 800 are actually commissioned law enforcement officers. The 300 civilians that we have are our support staff. We have our administrative support secretaries at the offices. We have our dispatchers, which are very crucial to our job. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without them. Those are the type of people that we have our of course payroll personnel staff that we have filling those civilian positions. And is when it comes to recruiting, are there any requirements, any high weight educational requirements? We do have educational requirements for state police, which is you have to have... I want to make sure I get the numbers correct on this, but you do have to have a high school education obviously when you come to apply.

And what the requirements are is when you have completed your probation on state police, which is two years, you have to have 60 hours of college credit. You will receive 30 hours of college credit for our academy. We do have it accredited through Santa Fe College. I had never heard of that before. That's really cool. It is very nice. And then what happens is you have that two-year probation to complete your remaining 30 hours. You can do it online. You can come to New Mexico State or any of the colleges within the state or near the state. So you can complete those 60 hours of college credit. As far as height and weight requirements, no. We do not have any... We don't even have an age requirement. We have all the way up into the 60s, we have them written down for the physical fitness requirements. And that is one of the requirements. That's the very first test that you'll take when you're applying for New Mexico State Police is the physical fitness test. Not an easy test to pass, is it? You've heard of the Cooper Institute, correct?

Actually, I have. It's a physical fitness institute started by Dr. Cooper and it's in Dallas, Texas. And they've done a lot of research and they've set down a list of standards for normal adults and children as well. But they've also done a special part where it's specific to law enforcement officers. And so they've set percentile rankings for law enforcement officers and their ability to complete physical tasks. So what we require of people coming into our academy is that they can complete it at the 50th percentile. And that gives us a certain set of numbers. So which means you can do these physical tasks better than 50% of the people that fit your age and gender category. When you complete the academy, you must graduate at a 60th percentile. And that's the requirement that we require of our officers to stay on the department as well. We, twice a year, we have to do physical fitness tests. Because in my reporter days, I worked with an officer, Armandaris, who I think was transferred here. And she's not very tall, but I certainly wouldn't want to cross her.

Don't get me wrong. She's a very professional. She's a very, very good officer. As a matter of fact, she's a recruiting officer here. Is she really a officer? And I couldn't think of someone better. She does a very good job. She's actually the top recruiter in the state. Now, many law enforcement organizations in other parts of the country are primarily highway patrols. But that's not the case here, is it? No, sir. We're actually state police. There's a couple of handfuls of state agencies that are still state police. Again, we have several that have become highway patrol. As state police, we still have full police powers. We aren't limited to certain areas within, say, the highway right away or whatnot. We actually have jurisdiction everywhere within the borders of New Mexico. Other than federal land, all of our bases and Native American reservations, unless the officers become cross commission as a tribal officer. Where are the officers initially trained and how often are the academies conducted?

And we had alluded a little bit about how tough it is to make it as an officer. We might have a statistic of percentages of graduates in comparison to those who originally apply. I don't have exact statistics for how many people make it through. But first of all, starting at the beginning, every person who wears a state police uniform goes through the state police academy. We have our own academy and only state police officers go through it. Now, once or twice throughout our history, we've had about 78 recruit classes since 1933. But in that history, once or twice, we've had people other than state police officers go through our academy. And that was at times where other departments didn't have training and they would bring their officers in to go through our academy. I guess that's a nice compliment. That was a while back. And so what we do as a state police officer is their New Mexico Department of Public Safety has a requirement for every law enforcement officer in the state. You have to pass a certain set of requirements.

And in the state police academy, we also have another set of requirements beyond that that we have to qualify for. That being said, we go through the academy. Generally, the academy varies between 20 and 22 weeks. It is a living academy. You don't go home at night. You go to Santa Fe to the academy and you stay there the entire time. There are a few weekends where you're released to come back and spend time with your family and take care of family business. But the rest of the time you do live at the academy. It's a very strict academy, or up early in the morning, a lot of very physically demanding tasks throughout the day. And again, it's also an academic academy. You have every week you have tests that you must pass an 80% or better or you fail out of the school. What kind of things do they study academically? Academically, of course, there's a lot of things that we need to study. One of them, the most important is criminal law. So they spend a great deal of time on criminal law. And of course, then we have a lot of constitutional type law. So we know how to protect people's rights. That is one of our jobs.

Then we have an accident investigation. We have one of the very important ones. We call it officer survival, officer safety. It's teaching you the nuts and bolts of being an officer on the street, dealing with people, good people, bad people, protecting yourself, protecting others. All of the hands-on type things that you need to do as an officer. And we spend a great deal of time in that. Obviously, the firearms, that's getting more into the maybe more of a physical type task. But there's a great deal of things that we do study. How much area does state police protect? We protect the entire state. I believe the population of the state now is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.8 million. And we cover the entire state. Obviously, in the larger cities, we tend to be more of a highway patrol type. A department just like in Albuquerque here in Las Cruces. We have a very large police department and a very large sheriff's department. And they are the primary 9-1-1.

If you call 9-1-1, it's going to go to their dispatch. So generally, we end up doing a lot of the highway work. But again, in the outlying communities, we are the primary law enforcement officers. So we generally get called to every type of crime that's imaginable. We have our officers handling this. Now, Las Cruces is called District 4. The Las Cruces office is the headquarters of District 4. And it looks like it's two counties that's District 4? It's actually, it's 4,500 square miles. It's all of Doniana County. And then we have little bits and pieces. We have some of Otero County down in Chaparral. We have a very small piece of Sierra County, which is the northern part of our district. And a little bit of Luna County, which is to the west of our district. Okay. But for the most part, it's Doniana County. But you've shaved off pretty much chunks of all the surrounding counties. Now, share with us some of the statewide, maybe even local achievements. State police is proud of.

I hear we have high seat belt usage in our state, things like that. Okay. Some of the things that we've had, and one of the things that we've focused on in state police is DUI reduction. We have a very strong DUI effort throughout the state. We, of course, we are arresting a lot of drunk drivers. And the purpose behind that is we're trying to reduce crashes. And, of course, we're trying to curb it from happening further. Last year, there were 23 fatal crashes and 10 of them alcohol related within Doniana County. Wow. And this year, of course, we don't have stats for the entire year, but we're only at 14 total fatalities, three of those being alcohol involved. So it seems that we're set on track to actually have a good reduction in first of all fatal crashes and then the number of crashes that are alcohol involved. And outside of the DUI enforcement, we have a lot of other programs that we're doing. We do some speed enforcement. We have special saturation patrols where we put a lot of officers in a small area.

And we look for things like aggressive drivers, the type of things that we generally call road rage. People tailgating, people cutting other people off, moving without signaling. A lot of things that lead to traffic crashes. Okay. And we're hoping to prevent that sort of thing from happening. And we've actually, for a while, we did it. We put all of our officers, we normally work an eight hour shift. And we did a great deal of time for several months where we were doing 11 hour shifts and in some cases, 12 hour shifts. Wow. So we had officers overlapping on their shifts. We'd have more officers out. And we were generating a lot of activity and getting a lot of enforcement time in and being able to really get ahead of the game, so to speak. So no substitute for actually being out there on the run. That's always the best thing is to have your eyes out there. Yes sir. You know, we only have about a minute and a half left. Let's close up the interview with talking about community relationships. What does community relationship mean to state police? Well, we have a lot of different things that we do.

We do some drivers' head classes in the high school. We're in the process of sending our officers to help with the drivers' head programs at the high schools. We do a lot of safety talks at the schools. Of course, we have officers with children in schools. So we send them to the schools to do safety talks for their kids. And of course, we get out there in the community and they get to see us and realize that we're, you know, we are part of the community and we're there to help. And I encourage people to, if you have issues that you're concerned about, to either call us, come to the state police office and bring those issues up to us. And we'll do what we can to try and attack those problems, to try and address them. And do what we can to make our community safe. Because a lot of times we get focused on certain things. And we may not notice something that's coming up. And we need the community to come in and help us identify those issues. Times up. And I wish we had another half hour to talk. Alex, great job. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Josh. I appreciate it. It's time again here for our weekly peace on minding your business.

It showcases some of the hardworking entrepreneurs and business people in our area. We call it the Greater Los Cruces Chamber of Commerce, local business feature. I've got to say, music was shot in Kingston and beautiful girls on the station. I'll always give you more of what you want to hear. Well, Radio of Los Cruces, all four stations have been together since 2001. Originally, we were one company group, Sunrise Broadcasting Incorporated. It has been around since the early 1990s and was in charge of running KGRT FM and KGRT AM at that time. It was until 2000 and KGRT AM became KSNM AM. And as a result, we were KGRT FM and KSNM AM. And then we moved over here, acquired two stations that were originally called KXDA FM and KSNM FM. And we changed the call letters on those stations and changed formats.

And they became KHQT FM and KKBS FM. But we offer two types of services to two different members of the community. The number one is actually the community itself. It's our job to put public service announcements on the air. It's our job to cover events that there's no dollars or anything necessary for it. For example, relay for life with the American Cancer Society. Walk America with Marcha Diamonds, which is one of the most successful walks in this town. We're involved in such projects as that. Whether it be getting announcements on the air, we're giving the people the opportunity to speak on air. To talk about the causes to explain about them. That's part of the way we serve our listeners. But that also helps out our listeners as well because besides giving them the news and information of the day, the daily stories and headlines. We also provide a service by being the local radio station in town, where if an emergency happens, we're there to cover it. Whether it be a flood in hatch. Whether it be a thunderstorm coming. Our airwaves are dedicated for that.

That's one part. That's the community part. The second part for the businesses is by helping out the business communities. You know, you have so many types of media today. You've got internet. You've got a national TV. You've got national streamlining things like iPods and stuff like that. Where a lot of local businesses can't advertise on. No local advertiser can't buy the 62nd ad to run exactly at the right time on CSI on any type of shows or anything. They can't buy an iPod ad that's going to go to every iPod that goes around. They can't get every internet setting that needs to be there. Local businesses can't do that. Our job here is to provide an outlet for local community members to get their message across. Whether it be a promotion, a business opening, or sales. To help bring more customers into their business. That's the second part of what's important for us and to our business community to give them that edge. It makes go takeover tours show in Albuquerque. With working with people in this community, things change a lot. A lot of businesses come in, but I still feel the best part of it is when you get to work with a local business. That's competing against one of these national change that moves in. You know, the national change I've got.

People that make decisions in other places but don't know this market here. You know, to see the local restaurant see how it strives as a perfect example of something great to work with. Because you get to come up and help them with promotions. They're just right across the street. They're right across the corner. You can meet with them and lunch. Have a personal talk. It's not sending an email and waiting for an impersonal response. Just to say, hey, go ahead and put that on. Let it run. No. You can actually be in the part of a project with the business and a community to bring more people with them. And they live here and it's successful and it works. It's the best part of them. That just about does it for this week. If you have a question or comment about the show, you can call the mind in your business hotline at 646-7350. Or email me at Charles Comer at Yahoo.com. For information on upcoming shows and an archive of past shows, log on to krwgtv.org and follow the mind in your business links. Again, I'd like to thank my guest, Sergeant Alex Orcasitas of the New Mexico State Police for coming on the show. And thank you so much for watching.

I'm Charles Comer. Here's hoping you have a great one. You