Sen. Antonio “Moe” Maestas speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 29, 2025 in Santa Fe. (Photo by Austin Fisher / Source NM)

A proposal to revamp New Mexico’s police training received a failing grade from a powerful Senate panel at the end of last week, but the lawmaker backing the bill says he’s not giving up.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday tabled Senate Bill 50, which backers say would bring New Mexico up to evolving national standards, reduce police use of force, improve evidence collection and support the prosecution of serious crime.

Sen. Antonio Maestas (D-Albuquerque), the bill’s sponsor, told the committee the existing standards do “nothing to advance the careers of the officers in the field, and [do] not necessarily make us more safe.”

Kris Michaelis supported the bill on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s New Mexico and Santa Fe branches.

She said people of color are disproportionately singled out as potentially dangerous and as suspicious, and SB50 would allow New Mexico police to be trained to understand “the boundaries between addressing suspicious behavior and over-policing.”

“We wouldn’t expect surgeons to use 20-year-old procedures in the operating room when new techniques have been discovered and effectively used to heal the sick,” she said. “Similarly, it is unfair to law enforcement to be expected to know best practices in keeping our citizens safe without updated training and education.”

The state Department of Public Safety, the New Mexico State Police and the New Mexico Police Chiefs Association opposed the bill because, according to them, Maestas didn’t consult them on it.

“We would have preferred to have worked in the interim on some of this legislation and we didn’t really have that opportunity,” DPS Cabinet Secretary Jason Bowie told the committee.

Sen. Crystal Brantley (R-Elephant Butte) said she would feel more comfortable with the bill if it had “more stakeholder engagement.”

Maestas said he gave initial drafts to police before introducing the bill and received input from Indivisible SOS Santa Fe, a women-led advocacy group that four years ago adopted improving professional education for police as a strategy to improve public safety.

Rachel Feldman, the chair of the organization’s Civil Rights & Law Enforcement Reform Committee, helped draft the bill. She is also the Law Enforcement Standards and Training Council’s appointed citizen-at-large, though she was not representing them in the hearing.

“Everything in this bill has been included because the needs have been expressed by law enforcement leadership in a number of venues,” Feldman told the committee, including interviews, focus groups and meetings with over 100 police leaders in New Mexico, along with discussions in council meetings.

Sen. Debbie O’Malley (D-Albuquerque) called the bill “a step in the right direction” and said there is a difference between police chiefs and rank-and-file officers.

“My understanding of this is that you want law enforcement to be successful, and that’s what I’m getting from this bill,” she told Maestas. “You’re not trying to take away from the basic training that needs to happen with officers but you’re looking at how we do all these other things so we don’t have the conflict between community and law enforcement that we continue to have.”

Training study

Feldman pointed the committee to an independent study of New Mexico’s police training from last year that showed there is “moderate” risk that the state could face legal liability for failing to train police to the level required to uphold the constitutional rights of people with whom they come into contact.

For example, researchers found that most of the academy’s basic training tests “have remained static and unchanged for years,” and mostly test cadets’ abilities to memorize information rather than their ability to apply knowledge to realistic situations they would encounter on the job.

The study was conducted by the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training and sent to the academy last August. The researchers noted that the last statewide job task analysis done by the academy “happened more than 24 years ago.”

Part of SB50’s purpose is to upgrade the training over the course of five years to create “career paths and curriculum for all law enforcement in New Mexico,” Feldman said.

After Feldman spoke, New Mexico State Police Chief Troy Weisler told the committee he wanted to correct “all this talk about 25-year-old training.”

“We have some of the best training in the country and so I just want to correct any assumption we might have had from some of the previous speakers on that,” Weisler said.

Judiciary chair tears apart bill

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Joseph Cervantes (D-Las Cruces) said he couldn’t support the bill because he found many examples of meaningless language in it.

“Really, throughout this whole thing, there’s so much that really could be subject to any number of different interpretations, could never really be defined or applied as a law, so I couldn’t support it with all of that,” he said.

Sen. Katy Duhigg (D-Albuquerque) chairs the Senate Rules Committee, through which appointments must pass before a full Senate vote. Duhigg said she opposed SB50 because the original version would have removed the Senate’s power over appointments to the Law Enforcement Certification Board and the New Mexico Law Enforcement Standards and Training Council. Maestas said the bill no longer does that, and that language was a “drafting error.”

After the vote, Maestas told the committee he’ll try again this session to modernize police training and continuing education standards, but won’t pursue other provisions in SB50 related to the two boards.

The bill also adds safety agencies’ dispatchers to state retention programs and other funding mechanisms. Carter Bundy, on behalf of AFSCME, supported the bill and told the committee fully staffing 911 centers would improve police and fire response times.

Weisler said including dispatchers in the Law Enforcement Retention Fund without also adding more money to it wouldn’t help and could “adversely affect public safety retention statewide.”

SB50 also includes language intended to clarify the relationship between DPS and the Law Enforcement Certification Board, which Maestas previously said has been the subject of “confusion” due to the department’s failure to complete tasks necessary for an “administratively attached” agency.

“I may not take a lot of time but I’m going to take a little bit of time to see if that’s possible, and see if in fact this bill can fit the standards of statutory construction and the majority of this committee,” he said.

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