At town hall, Sen. Joe Cervantes addresses public safety in blunt terms

What plagues us is not an absence of laws.”

State Sen. Joseph Cervantes

State Sen. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces, has no election opponent this year. During a town hall Monday evening that ran over two hours, he admitted more than once that running unopposed may have helped loosen his tongue. 

Addressing recent public safety ordinances enacted in Las Cruces, a special legislative session last month that rejected most of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s agenda and ongoing debates about sentencing, pretrial detention and competency in New Mexico law, Cervantes was often blunt, pushing back against proposals he said politicize criminal justice and lead to laws lacking in solutions.

The meeting was convened by Donna Stryker, a founder of the Business for a Safer Las Cruces group, and drew approximately 50 people to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum. Among those present were members of the Coalition of Conservatives in Action, Mayor Eric Enriquez, city councilor Johana Bencomo and Las Cruces police chief Jeremy Story, who sat in the front row in his service uniform. 

Cervantes, who grew up in La Mesa and attended high school in Las Cruces, said he, like some other citizens, felt less safe in the city than 10 years ago. He presented data suggesting property crime rates in Las Cruces in recent years, per 100,000 population, were significantly higher than in Albuquerque and El Paso. He referred the public to his “Joe Cervantes for NM” Facebook page for links to the data.

Yet he set out an extended case aiming to persuade attendees that “what plagues us is not an absence of laws.” 

Lujan Grisham has rebuked the legislature, where her fellow Democrats hold majorities of both chambers, for failing to take up her public safety bills in July. She has since held a series of town halls around the state, including a July 25 meeting in Las Cruces that drew 500 people and lasted more than six hours. In these sessions she has called for communities to press local legislators to support a crime package that critics have said include proposals that are ineffective and not humane. 

Cervantes countered on Tuesday: “We had hours and hours and hours of committee meetings and hearings and presentations, including by the governor’s staff. We went through and pored over the data and the research … and had all concluded well before the session began that the agenda was not really well advised.” 

Taking the special session agenda items one by one, he said the proposals were legally deficient, redundant to laws already on the books in New Mexico or unlikely to survive a constitutional challenge.

The senator, an attorney who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said politicians tended to treat new laws with harsher sentences as a solution to crime that pleases members of the public and earns complimentary editorials. He said calls for lawmakers to pass new, tougher legislation were perennial, coming even from the governor; and he noted that criminal penalties for possession of guns after being convicted of felonies had been increased “four times in the last six years.” 

Yet he argued that increased penalties are irrelevant in the face of dropped prosecutions, plea deals and failure to enforce laws locally, by police, prosecutors and in courts. 

Invited to speak, Chief Story said that out of 43 charged with being felons in possession of a gun in a period from 2021-22, none had been convicted at trial, and six defendants had signed plea agreements that aggregated other felony charges: None faced prison time for felony possession alone despite increased criminal penalties. 

“The laws that were in place five and 10 years ago were less strict than they are today, and yet we were safer then,” Cervantes said.

While proceedings that lead to dismissal of cases for defendants judged incompetent to stand for trial have been hotly debated this year in Santa Fe, Cervantes pointed to data showing that competency only accounts for 4 percent of dismissed cases in New Mexico. Far greater contributors, he said, are failed prosecutions, failure by officers to appear in court, plea bargains or dropped charges.  

Although that is statistically small, during questions and answers some attendees expressed frustration, noting that a small number of repeat offenders locally were implicated in multiple incidents only to be released. They also expressed disappointment about a lack of specific solutions from the senator’s presentation. Cervantes replied that he only wanted to discourage false hope in “tough on crime” laws that boost politicians’ profiles without making cities safer. He expressed disdain for laws intended to send messages without clear enforcement, or enacting redundant laws, without holding local agencies, district attorneys and judges accountable. 

“What I’m getting at is, people are not doing their job,” he said, “and I’ve become fond of saying that I can’t pass a law to get people off their ass.” 

Cervantes also addressed publicly, for the first time, a pair of controversial ordinances enacted by the Las Cruces City Council. 

Cervantes said the city was shrewd to frame its ordinance restricting pedestrians in traffic medians, where panhandling sometimes takes place, as a public safety measure rather than a panhandling ban, since the latter could run afoul of First Amendment speech protections and likely struck down in court. The problem, he said, is reflected in the traffic data: "While New Mexico has some of the worst pedestrian death (rates) in the whole country, they're not pedestrian deaths because of people panhandling on medians," and noted that Chief Story had acknowledged as much.  

Addressing a new ordinance requiring businesses to secure their shopping carts from theft or face potential fines or jeopardy for their business licenses, Cervantes said, "I was troubled by the notion that it would become a crime to be a victim of a crime, which is what would really be the case for a business that has shopping carts. ... That doesn't make a lot of sense to me."