Rising line of duty deaths in New Mexico spur calls for stronger legislation

Publish date: 2024-04-23

LAS CRUCES, N.M. (KFOX) — The total line of duty deaths in the state of New Mexico is now at 184.

Over the last five years, in order, New Mexico State Police Officer Darian Jarrott, Alamogordo Police Officer Anthony Ferguson, Las Cruces Police Officer Jonah Hernandez, and New Mexico State Police Officer Justin Hare all died after being killed by a deadly weapon.

KFOX spoke with the New Mexico Governor’s Public Safety Advisor Benjamin Baker about the troubling situation as police officers nationwide continue to face dangerous conditions.

“I’ve been a New Mexico law enforcement officer for 27 years, so I’ve been to a number of law enforcement funerals, and it is a horrible situation, and it is one that needs immediate attention,” Baker said.

Following the stabbing death of Hernandez, Las Cruces Police Chief Jeremy Story said enough is enough, advocating for stronger legislation at the state level to protect officers and their communities.

The biggest thing I want to see happen soon is dealing with our issues with competency. People are arrested for a crime and found incompetent, and the case gets dismissed, there’s no consequence. And most states there’s treatment or there’s competency restoration, that doesn’t exist in New Mexico,” Story said.We share Chief Story’s concerns related to keeping law enforcement safe, keeping our communities safe and have taken extraordinary measures, particularly in the last year’s legislative session,” Baker said.

One of those measures mentioned, was signing Senate Bill 271 into law, which is a bill focused on pre-trial detention, which means if someone is out on conditions for an active felony case and they commit another crime, the judge is allowed to hold that person without bond.

"By doing things like increasing the penalties for being a felon in possession of a firearm, increasing the penalties for those who commit second-degree murder, both of which were put forward in this last legislative session, along with increasing one’s ability to remain in custody for safety purposes, which was also signed,” said Baker. "On the other side of the governor's work, she has funded, two years in a row, a comprehensive job task analysis, and what that does is it hires an outside nationally recognized contractor to look at the entire state in the professions of law enforcement and public safety telecommunicators and figuring out if the training methodology is meeting the requirements and the needs of the job."

Baker emphasized what’s in place to try to prevent repeat offenders but how it's not necessarily completely addressing the problem.

“Once you have become a prohibited person by being convicted of a felony in the state of New Mexico, you are no longer allowed to pick up firearms and with increased frequency, we are seeing in our data, that felons are not dissuaded by this requirement and re-arm themselves, so that legislation was designed specifically to attack the problem of violent felons rearming themselves with firearms,” Baker said.

Baker said highlighting that the work to fix that issue, is not done.

“We proposed and put forward and supported on this call, on this budget session, one of the most robust, maybe even nationwide, felon in possession of firearm criminal penalty enhancements. It did not pass this legislative process, but it complemented multiple things, not the least in which my opinion is the increase to a mandatory period of incarceration for those who repeatedly refuse to comply with the conditions of their previous felony conviction,” Baker said.

Baker noted that he and the governor will continue to work closely with law enforcement leaders across the state like Chief Story to not only address public safety, but to help make sure officers make it back home to their families after every shift.

The message is that we have to do something, we can’t continue to let it get worse, we can’t let it stay the same, we have to make things better,” Story said.

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