A new direction

GRANTS, N.M. – Since the opening moments of his administration, Grants Police Chief Steve Chavez has been an embattled leader. The City of Grants is no stranger to internal turmoil, especially over the course of the last four years; turmoil the police department contributed to. The Chavez administration ended in a letter of resignation submitted Oct. 18 and accepted by the City of Grants.

Lieutenant Jeff Marez will serve as interim chief.

When asked if there would be more resignations from GPD, City Manager Vanessa Chavez said, “Today is October 18, I only want to talk about October 18.”

Why the resignation?

“I want to see the Grants Police Department move in a new direction,” City Manager Chavez said.

A copy of Chief Chavez’s resignation letter was not available to the Cibola Citizen by press time, Manager Chavez explained that due to the personnel nature of the letter, it may be legally protected communication for the moment and was pending legal review as of press time.

Manager Chavez promised a fair process when selecting and searching for a new police chief. According to Cibola Citizen archives, the last time a new chief was selected, it was with the promise of a transpar ent hiring committee. When asked for the names of members on the board, the Citizen was denied and never learned the names of every person who sat on the committee which hired S. Chavez to be chief.

An embattled chief

After 30 years of service in law enforcement, Grants Police Chief Marty Vigil announced his retirement in May of 2018. This opened the door for a new chief to enter Grants.

In the June 13, 2018, edition of the Cibola Citizen Steve Chavez was declared chief by then-City Manager Laura Jaramillo, who said “We put together a committee, and on the committee, we had two community members who were former law enforcement and then we had our finance director, our city treasurer, our administrative assistant, and myself,” she added, “and Fred Padilla, City Councilman.”

According to Article 5, Section 2C of the Grants City Charter, “Neither the Mayor nor any City Councilor shall in any manner control or demand the hiring of any person by the City Manager, but the Mayor and each City Councilor may express their individual or collective views, and fully and freely discuss anything pertaining to a potential hiring.” This is because city leaders sitting on hiring boards such as this can give an air of impropriety to the hiring, Padilla’s position on the committee may have been a violation of this section of the charter, potentially illegitimazing the process.

Jaramillo explained that Chavez had 30 years’ worth of experience, and Chavez is quoted as saying, “I’ve been in administration before, I’ve done complex investigations.” He continues, “I think I’m exactly what they need at this point.”

On July 25, 2018, the Citizen reported that issues quickly rose among the dedicated officers of GPD, who were unhappy with the selection of Chavez as chief, with multiple officers speaking at the time to the Citizen under the exclusive privilege of anonymity about how morale hit an all-time-low at the department within weeks of the hiring.

Issues began to grow when then-Lieutenant Moses Marquez was fired by the chief and then-Manager Jaramillo. Questions about the legality of this firing were raised, but GPD continued to operate, until a closed-door meeting between the staff at GPD and the administrative leaders of Chavez and Jaramillo. Since this reporting, the Citizen has received multiple recordings of the conversation between both sides.

In this meeting, Jaramillo and Chavez are heard explaining to the GPD staff that they must give the chief respect. Officers were angered at the time by a series of issues at the department, by the time the July 25, 2018, report was written, there had already been five sexual harassment grievances filed against the chief, many of whom complained he had dug too deep into their personal lives. In a separate interview with the Citizen, Chavez denied these grievances, but he is heard addressing the grievances in the recording with then-Manager Jaramillo present.

Moral issues stemmed from the firing of Marquez; addressing those issues Jaramillo is heard saying, “I believe that morale begins with the middle group. The middle leaders are where the morale is down.” An unidentified officer is heard in the background saying, “It looks like you don’t even care about our concerns.”

A July 20, 2018, anonymous email to the Cibola Citizen read, “As of this date one of the female administrative assistants has resigned due to Chief Chavez’s conduct and Mrs. Jaramillo’s failure to address the complaints with any type of corrective behavior. Officers felt her response to their complaints were not taken seriously and individually chose to resign.”

In this same edition of the newspaper, the city defended then-Chief Chavez, Jaramillo is quoted as saying “‘Mayor Hicks called right before the meeting,’ announced Jaramillo, ‘and he wanted to make sure that I let the council know he supports our police chief 100 percent.’”

A turning point was about to occur which would tarnish the department.

Not even one full week after this incident, a decision was reached that determined then-Lieutenant Marquez was improperly fired. Marquez’ 15-year long career in law enforcement was given the respect it deserved, before he, and multiple other officers would leave the force.

In the September 29, 2019, edition of the Cibola Citizen Chavez explains that he has been working on recruiting new officers and will be moving the Grants Police Department to a new “Community Policing” approach. These changes were going to include PSAs to the community, and training of service aides to handle non-criminal calls. It is unclear as of press time whether the latter was a successful opera tion. GPD did put a small number of PSAs after this announcement was made but they were never a large part of the administration’s actual efforts.

Almost one month later, on October 24, 2018, GPD began a new training and recruitment drive. In this edition of the Cibola Citizen several officers are spoken with and quoted, only Lieutenant Jeff Marez and Lieutenant David Chavez remain on the force. All others, including Detective Sergeant Corey White, have left the force.

Over the next several months GPD would continue to operate, and the streets appeared to be moderately safe, with the occasional murder occurring in the city. During the entirety of Chavez’ administration GPD did not participate in one single joint operation with the Cibola County Narcotics Taskforce, Chavez maintained that GPD was never invited to these operations, a statement other agencies in the narco taskforce reject.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March of 2020 GPD stopped providing the Cibola Citizen with weekly arrest logs, this initial pause was due to the shutdown, but when business began to resume, GPD informed the Citizen that they had switched systems and could no longer provide this documentation, despite the fact that the system was changed before the shutdown and physical records of these arrest logs exist dating back to 2017. Reports in this form remain unavailable to the Cibola Citizen as of press time.

In late 2020, GPD established a Street Crimes Unit, which would be used to specifically tackle narcotics issues in the city. Around this time, the Cibola Citizen began hearing rumors about a high volume of “Declination to Prosecute” letters, which are given to officers when an arrest they made doesn’t have enough evidence or properly filed evidence to take to court.

On June 7, 2021, GPD gave the Citizen an exclusive on how they managed to arrest Jesse Burke of Grants by the Street Crimes Unit. The morning that story published, a large number of Cibola County Sheriff’s Deputies arrived at the newspaper office to question why an arrest they had made was being cov ered as if GPD was behind the arrest. This turned into a several-day long argument between agencies who finally all agreed to move forward.

In the June 16, 2021, edition of the Cibola Citizen Lt. Marez of GPD sat down for an interview where he discussed the Off-Highway Vehicle epidemic in Grants. Proceeding with community safety in mind, GPD was able to get a handle on the people who were racing OHVs across the city, averting potentially deadly outcomes of OHV racing on city streets.

In the September 22, 2021, edition of the Cibola Citizen, it was reported that a GPD investigation helped lead to the arrest of Alejandro Balderrama, a suspect to homicide. GPD announced that they had been working very closely with the 13th Judicial District Attorney’s Office in this effort, where they received training in warrant writing and other areas. Here, the Cibola Citizen broke the news about GPD’s high volume of declination letters.

The city now looks to the future, with Lt. Jeff Marez serving as active chief.