Bill requiring university police to wear body cams awaits Senate vote

Senate legislation would mandate that university police officers use body cameras, adapting what the bill’s sponsor called an “oversight” in the original law’s wording.

Senate Bill 505 passed its second committee Feb. 28 and is waiting for a vote on the Senate floor.

The latter part of the bill also clarifies language surrounding an officer’s liability for destruction of evidence should they turn off their camera.

The bill wouldn’t penalize officers for technological malfunctions or other unintended failures, said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Joseph Cervantes, D-Las Cruces. The bill states that only officers who have “knowingly or intentionally” turned off their cameras, prematurely erased footage, or otherwise tampered with the technology would be liable for destruction of evidence.

“This isn’t anti-law enforcement legislation,” Cervantes said.

Cervantes sponsored the original body cameras bill in 2020, which required city, county and state police departments to implement the technology. The bill was signed into law in the wake of national calls for police reform after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The wording of the original law didn’t specifically call on university police to adopt body cameras, allowing the University of New Mexico and Western New Mexico University to delay implementation.

“This (bill) eliminates that ambiguity,” Cervantes said last week in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Five years after the original law’s passage, the University of New Mexico is the only university that doesn’t currently use body cameras.

New Mexico State University was the first to adopt the technology in 2011, around the same time that the Albuquerque Police Department was federally mandated to adopt them after an observed pattern of excessive force. Eastern New Mexico University implemented body cameras in 2012, and most recently, Western New Mexico adopted them in December.

UNM has the highest number of police encounters of any state university law enforcement agency, with 189 reported this year as of Feb. 26, according to Clery Act crime data. The federal law requires colleges and universities to report campus crime data, among other things.

In August, UNM announced it would adopt body cameras in “three to six months.” More than six months later, UNMPD hasn’t fully implemented body cameras, although the technology has been purchased and additional staff hired, said UNM spokesperson Cinnamon Blair. Body cameras should be implemented “within a month” to comply with the bill should it pass, Blair said.

“It shouldn’t take public outcry, it shouldn’t take bad press, it shouldn’t take Internal Affairs investigations... to get us here,” Cervantes said.