Santa Fe police take months to provide bodycam footage -- except for social media

How long does it take city staff to prepare and release police lapel camera footage to the public?

In Santa Fe, that can depend upon who wants the footage.

For arrest videos that are posted alongside news releases by the Santa Fe Police Department on its social media pages, the timeline can be as little as a few hours. Lapel camera videos requested by the public, however, can take months or even years to be prepared and disclosed -- if they are released at all.

Requests submitted by The New Mexican seeking lapel camera footage from Santa Fe police regularly languish for months in the city's public records portal. Meanwhile, the agency posts body camera videos to its Facebook account highlighting the work of its officers, including certain arrests.

While government officials from the city as well as other local and state agencies have bemoaned the process of reviewing and redacting video footage as time-consuming, the fast turnaround for police social media posts indicates preparing videos for public consumption can be done expeditiously if city staff are inclined to release them.

Santa Fe police Deputy Chief Ben Valdez argued providing records to the public in response to requests and posting arrest videos to Facebook are "two separate processes."

Valdez noted the videos the agency posts to Facebook are often less than three minutes long. He often reviews those videos himself before posting them, he said, aiming to provide videos of incidents "that are matters of public concern so we can share that information with people."

"We use that as a tool to highlight the work that our folks are doing, to educate the community and to show them that information," he said. "And, again, our hope is that our media partners can utilize those videos."

Requests for body camera videos from the public are routed to the city records custodian, and are fulfilled mostly by city staff who work within the City Attorney's Office, with some help from police.

"Now, if a request for the entire video is going to be requested, that's a different process, and that's going to be a bit longer, because now we're looking at not just three minutes of video that we put out, but it could be a longer time span -- an hour or an hour-plus," Valdez said.

The agency's lapel cameras -- along with the cameras on each police cruiser -- store footage in a database that is accessible by police department officials as well as by city records staff.

The process of preparing footage for release involves watching videos and making redactions, sometimes by blurring faces or driver's licenses that appear onscreen or by bleeping audio.

The end result, however, of the city's failure to provide video in accordance with state law is that Santa Fe police lapel camera footage is inaccessible to the public unless police officials choose to release it.

The New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act requires local and state government entities to allow for the inspection of public records "immediately or as soon as practicable."

Earlier this month, Santa Fe police posted five different lapel camera videos showing sobriety testing and arrests of five different people accused of drunken driving, with all of the videos posted about 12 hours after the most recent arrest was made. A few days later, the police Facebook page featured several videos of arrests made in connection with one of the agency's sting operations in late February targeting "online child predators."

Several requests for footage submitted by The New Mexican have sat for months or years before any records have been released, including requests that are limited to brief police interactions involving only one officer.

A request for lapel camera footage from a March 2024 police chase, shooting and K-9 attack turned two years old earlier this month with many of the videos still not released. While the city has released some of the footage from the incident, records staff were still reviewing dozens of video clips, according to a December message pertaining to the request.

When asked whether six months or a year is a reasonable time period for members of the public to wait to receive footage in response to a records request, Valdez said "it just depends on what the incident is."

In some cases, the lapel camera footage withheld by the city could show officers in a less-flattering light than the short arrest videos the agency shares.

City staff as of Friday had not provided any records in response to a request for footage from a single officer from an October call that resulted in two arrests.

The request -- which The New Mexican submitted in October -- concerns the arrest of a man and woman outside a store after the couple was accused of stealing diapers.

Santa Fe police arrested the two on charges unrelated to shoplifting following an investigation that a prosecutor from the First Judicial District Attorney's Office called "unconstitutional from the jump" in a court filing dismissing the case.

Officer Nicholas Lefleur was dispatched to a CVS for the call, in which an employee reported a man and woman had stolen diapers, according to the police affidavit filed in the criminal case. After finding a couple sitting in a pickup that was a different color than the one described by the caller, Lefleur threatened the man with a police dog, saying, "sit down on the curb or this dog's [going to] get out and bite you," he wrote in the affidavit.

Lefleur placed "stop sticks" behind the tires of the couple's pickup while detaining them, then let them go after questioning them, the affidavit states. After they began to drive away and he saw their "defective" license plate, Lefleur wrote he and several other officers pulled the couple over again down the street.

After the man refused to tell the officer his name, Lefleur used a facial recognition tool to identify him, using his own lapel camera footage from the first interaction.

Prosecutor Jennifer Padgett Macias in her dismissal of the case noted the use of police dogs and stop sticks. She also noted the officer's reengaging with the couple based on their license plate and "confirming his ID through the app that we have already said is not okay."