Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (middle) and local leaders discuss public safety at a town hall in Raton on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025.
Nearly 100 Colfax County residents filled the Shuler Theater in downtown Raton Monday night during Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s latest town hall to talk about pretrial detention, red flag laws, natural disasters and other public safety issues.
Monday’s meeting was the second town hall hosted by the governor in two weeks, following one held in Alamogordo. According to Jodi McGinnis Porter, deputy communications director for the governor’s office, 88 people signed into the meeting, which lasted just under three and a half hours.
“I embarked on these specific public safety town halls because I am struggling to get policymakers to help us enact new laws that we believe would make us all safer in our communities and create real accountability, by a number of populations, that I don’t think have been accountable since 2016 or before,” Lujan Grisham said.
Leading House Democrats recently unveiled their priorities for the session, and cited public safety as a key concern.
The governor told the audience that while other states experience reductions in repeat, violent and juvenile crime, New Mexico is only seeing “some modest reductions” in property crime in larger cities. And the small gains the state is making in property crime “pales” to the issues of juvenile crime, repeat offenses and property damage.
As she’s done in previous town halls, Lujan Grisham reiterated claims that judges throughout the state have dismissed large numbers of cases due to defendants’ lack of competency. She renewed her support for updating treatment requirements for competency cases, pretrial detention and stricter penalties for violent offenses.
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Raton resident Rich Kuhns said he works in Albuquerque seasonally as a professional Santa Claus through the Cherry Hill Programs, and was at the Cottonwood Mall last year when there was a shooting.
“I grew up in the barrios of LA, next to Compton and Watts, and I see Albuquerque very similar to that during the 60s and 70s,” Kuhns said. “There needs to be something done.”
Lujan Grisham posited that “crime travels,” largely along the major interstates, but also seeps into smaller New Mexico communities. She encouraged Kuhns and everyone in the audience to call their legislators to support or disagree with legislation being proposed for the upcoming session.
Jerry Hogrefe, police chief for the Village of Angel Fire, criticized the state’s red flag laws, and said in cases of protection orders, seizure of firearms should be immediate, not after a 48-hour wait.
“Take the cuffs off the cops and let us be able to identify the person with the mental health issues, with the anger issues,” Hogrefe said. “Some people simply shouldn’t have guns.”
Monte Gore, Colfax County manager and retired undersheriff, said laws in the state make it hard for officers to take action, and lawmakers need to “go back to basics” to resolve these problems.
“When citizens call the police, what they want is somebody to come and resolve the situation. And if the law enforcement officer gets there and for whatever reason there’s not enough probable cause or there’s not enough of a law that’s been broken that they can take action, then nothing gets done,” Gore said.
Sue Martin brought up issues she’s had as a Colfax County landlord with squatters, and said she believes laws governing such situations do not favor landlords anymore. In New Mexico, landlords must file a lawsuit to evict squatters and if the court agrees, it determines how long the people have to remove themselves from the property.
As for more typical landlord tenant evictions, the state introduced the Eviction Prevention and Diversion Program to help keep people housed, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. New Mexico Supreme Court Justice Shannon Bacon told Source New Mexico in 2022 that the Landlord Tenant Act is “largely pro-landlord.”
Lujan Grisham said she has not reviewed those particular state laws in several months, but agreed that there might be a better “common sense” compromise.
The governor has hosted approximately a dozen public safety town halls throughout the state by now, which is a week before the 2025 Legislative Session is set to begin.
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