A ride on the night shift with Santa Fe police
Sep. 4—For the first time in weeks, Santa Fe police Officer Andrew Laur is having a slow night. It's 1:30 a.m. Aug. 25, and the graveyard shift has been uncharacteristically quiet.
For the last few weeks, Laur says, he and fellow graveyard officers have been going nonstop from call to call from the start of their shift at 8:30 p.m. until the end 10 hours later. This night has been different.
As he begins conducting a close patrol at the Las Palomas apartment complex on Hopewell Street, his night of proactive policing appears to be shattered. He receives a report from 911 dispatchers of a possible active shooting at the Casitas de Bella apartments on Cerrillos Road.
Laur's demeanor changes as he shifts into gear.
Being a police officer may mean no two working days are the same. For those on the graveyard shift, no two minutes are reliably the same. As they conduct patrols in the darkness of night, when most residents are fast asleep, the duties of graveyard officers can go from mundane to intense at a moment's notice.
The suspect Laur is seeking at Casitas de Bella is a man police encountered earlier in the night after he was beaten at the complex by several other men but declined to pursue charges.
As Laur drives to what could be a deadly encounter at the apartment complex, he grabs the AR-15 rifle that has been sitting motionless by his side. He readies the weapon one-handed.
He looks at his patrol SUV's computer-aided dispatch system and sees a line of fellow officers behind him — all en route and prepared for a high-stakes situation.
When Laur pulls into the parking lot at Casitas de Bella, he switches out his AR-15 with a less-lethal 40 mm launcher. He says no other officers at the scene are equipped with this alternative, which allows them more options in their response to the suspect.
Laur and the other officers then rush into the building — unaware the pistol that drew them to the scene is an airsoft gun that shoots nonlethal plastic pellets. The incident will end peacefully.
Not long after the start of his shift, Laur and other officers were dispatched downtown in response to reports of a man spitting and yelling at a woman. They found the man had punched windows at Hotel St. Francis. He and the woman were a "famous couple" in Santa Fe, Laur says, adding officers knew them on a first-name basis because of their frequent disturbances.
That incident also ended with no charges, and the couple hugged on a sidewalk.
To a passerby, the encounter might have seemed out of the ordinary. To the officers who patrol Santa Fe streets almost every night, it was far from unusual.
"It's all about perspective," Laur says.
Unconventional hours, short staffing
Laur has been on the graveyard shift for 2 1/2 years.
Officer Michael Romero, whom Laur stops to accompany during a routine traffic stop on St. Michael's Drive, has been with the Santa Fe Police Department for a year and a half and has been working the graveyard shift since March. Department veterans have told him every rookie should work graveyard for at least a year, he says.
Romero enjoys the late-night shift. After working as a correctional officer at the Penitentiary of New Mexico south of Santa Fe for four years — three of them on graveyard duty — he is used to the unconventional hours.
He's also become accustomed to the effects of the department's staffing shortage.
Chief Paul Joye said the agency now has 30 vacancies out of 169 sworn positions. However, he added, a number of experienced officers from other law enforcement agencies will join the department Sept. 19 as lateral hires. The graveyard shift has less staffing than others, he said, because it typically receives fewer calls for service. He noted an overlap between the graveyard shift and swing shift, which ends at midnight, putting more officers on the street for several late-night hours.
On the overnight shift that stretches from late Aug. 24 to early Aug. 25, there are seven officers on staff, along with two sergeants and a desk officer back at the station.
Romero says he he has spoken with senior officers about a time when there were 17 officers on the shift, a number that helped prevent burnout.
Laur and Romero both commute to the city and say they spend the drive decompressing.
Laur drives to work daily from his home in Albuquerque. With a young daughter and a fiancée who works as a 911 dispatcher in Sandia Pueblo, he says the drive home allows him time to transition from "Officer Laur" to just "Andrew."
Romero commutes from Edgewood. The young officer, also a father, says it was hard at first to separate the things he sees at work from a different set of responsibilities he faces at home. Like Laur, he says the commute helps him process and alleviate work-related stress so he is prepared to be there for his young son.
"Every officer has to learn how to do it — learn how to make that work/life balance," he says. "I'm still learning."
'Holy cow, somebody's actually shooting'
Every night on the graveyard shift presents an opportunity for learning.
The Casitas de Bella incident was one such occasion.
" 'Holy cow, somebody's actually shooting,' " Romero says he thought at the time. "All of us treated it like an active shooter."
It was his first experience with a possible active shooting while on duty, he says. He was one of the officers who had responded to the fight at the complex earlier in the evening that led to the beating of the man with the airsoft gun.
"I had a feeling we were coming back," he says.
According to a police department incident report, the tenant's girlfriend told Romero and other officers several men had beaten her boyfriend outside his apartment after the couple returned home from a night out.
The tenant, who was bleeding badly from his head, grabbed his airsoft pistol after police left because he felt unsafe, he told officers. He said he had fired the pistol a few times out of frustration, which prompted a maintenance worker to report a shooting.
Each officer responding the shooting report, including Laur and Romero, went up an opposite side of a stairwell at Casitas de Bella to a second-story hallway. Romero's body camera footage of the incident shows the officer knocking on residents' doors and asking confused tenants if they heard gunshots.
They said they hadn't.
This prompted officers to slightly tone down their approach, Romero says.
The police report states one officer called the suspect on his cellphone and asked what was going on and if he had any weapons. During the call, the tenant's girlfriend walked out of the apartment and was secured by officers.
Her boyfriend then walked out with what appeared to be a pistol in his hand.
A police sergeant yelled at the man to put the gun down and to get down on the ground. Romero says he never heard a sergeant yell like that. Tensions were running high.
The tenant rapidly complied and was detained.
The tension dissipated after Laur inspected the man's apartment and took a closer look at the airsoft gun.
Romero looked at his smartwatch and found his heart rate had jumped to 130 beats per minute.
The incident ended around 2:20 a.m., and the seven officers at the scene gave debriefings in the parking lot, talking through the incident and joking with each other.
Laur and Romero say the situation came close to a far worse outcome.
But the week's problems at Casitas de Bella were not over.
Police responding to a request for a welfare check on a tenant at the complex Aug. 26 found 63-year-old Michael Trilling dead in his apartment. A state medical examiner determined the man had died from blunt-force trauma and classified the death as a homicide.
Santa Fe police Capt. Aaron Ortiz said the department was looking into whether the homicide might be connected with the earlier violence at the complex. So far, no suspects have been identified.
'You don't get bored'
After a night full of traffic stops, a search of license plates for stolen vehicles and the incident at Casitas de Bella, Laur and Romero meet up near the end of their shift at Dunkin' to get breakfast.
As they eat breakfast sandwiches in the parking lot, Laur recalls a recent time when he and four other officers were called to a scene amid a lull in a long shift. Romero was already at the site, the Las Palomas apartments, responding to the report of a man down.
Laur remembers thinking the call would not need additional backup. But it was a homicide — the first Romero had ever responded to. The fatal shooting in June of 19-year-old Juan Emmanuel Vazquez-Salas remains unsolved.
"We all literally got up, threw our food away ... ran out to our cars," Laur says. "It was just a convoy of all of us flying over to the apartments."
That rush to the scene just as the night appeared to be over encapsulates the highs and lows of working the graveyard shift — or any shift — for a police officer in Santa Fe.
"Every day really is something different, and that was one of the good things and positives of being an officer," Joye said. "You don't get bored."
