DWI: State liquor-enforcement officers target bars, restaurants in push to makes streets safer

On Saturday night during the Fiesta de Santa Fe, which for many locals is an annual excuse to party, a pair of state Special Investigations Division agents did a walk-through at a downtown bar.

Sgt. Juan Griego and Agent Michael Blea were there to check for compliance with the liquor laws of a state which, based on drunken-driving statistics, has a bit of a drinking problem.

As they prepared to leave the Fusion nightclub on Palace Avenue, manager Annette Lujan bid them goodbye, saying, “You know we love you guys.”

The agents laughed. While their advice might be appreciated, they know no one in the liquor-service industry loves them.

The Special Investigations Division, along with state police and local law-enforcement officers, are battlefront troops in the state’s officially declared war on drunken driving. Given the task at hand, however, some think their ranks are too thin.

New Mexico has 38 agents statewide to enforce laws against serving underage or intoxicated bar patrons. Experts and anti-DWI advocates say that is not enough in a state that ranks eighth in the U.S. for drunken-driving fatalities and recorded 139 deaths in 2006.

Linda Atkinson, executive director of the DWI Resource Center in Albuquerque, said national and state studies show about half the people arrested for driving while intoxicated have been drinking in a bar or restaurant, so it’s important to have a stronger law-enforcement presence.

Bernalillo County, which has 634 liquor and restaurant beer-and-wine licenses, is willing to pay for two more agents out of its own pocket, said Kevin Kinzie, administrator of substance-abuse programs. But Kinzie said he wasn’t sure the state would allow it to spend money for that purpose.

Rebecca Beardsley, Santa Fe County DWI program coordinator, said, “They just seem to be short-staffed, and if they had more officers they could be more effective.”

Alcohol-related problems in the United States could be substantially reduced with increased enforcement of alcohol laws, James Fell, senior program director at the Alcohol, Policy and Safety Research Center at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, said in a 2002 report.

In an interview, Fell said he doesn’t believe any states have enough liquor agents to adequately enforce state liquor laws, and because many states are strapped for money, it’s unlikely they can afford to add more.

But the agents can make a difference, along with New Mexico’s other anti-drunken-driving initiatives, such as installing ignition interlocks in cars to help prevent offenders from driving after drinking, as well as education programs and tougher punishment.

The number of people who died in alcohol-related crashes in New Mexico decreased from 193 in 2005 to 139 in 2006. The number of citations issued by the Special Investigations Division in the same period increased from 423 to 601, according to Bob Hagan, spokesman for the state Regulation & Licensing Department.

Rachel O’Connor, DWI “czar” for the Governor’s Office, said this year’s rankings for DWI fatalities are due out later this fall, and the state expects to see further improvement.

A busy shift

The 38 SID agents in New Mexico keep track of 2,162 licenses for alcoholic-beverage outlets of all kinds. Many of the agents have to patrol large areas. Sgt. Griego, 53, said he usually drives anywhere from 350 to 650 miles a week while monitoring bars and restaurants.

During Santa Fe’s recent Fiesta, Griego and five other agents met at the Flying Tortilla on Cerrillos Road at 6 p.m. for dinner — and multiple cups of coffee — in preparation for another night at the city’s bars. The night before, Griego’s workday had ended at 5 a.m.

When the waiter came to take his order, Griego ordered a shot of whiskey, keeping a straight face until the confused waiter told him the restaurant didn’t serve whiskey. Then Griego laughed, saying he had forgotten to tuck away the SID identification hanging from around his neck.

Griego and his agents work in plainclothes, and on this night they brought in agents from Albuquerque, Grants and Gallup in hopes that the people who work in bars here wouldn’t recognize them as SID agents.

Most of the agents were dressed in jeans, and with the exception of the agent from Grants, who was more than 6 feet tall, had a short haircut and wore khakis, it would be difficult to guess any of the agents were police officers. The agent from Albuquerque looked as though she could have stepped out of a University of New Mexico dorm room.

In the parking lot, the agents split up, agreeing to meet later. Downtown, Griego and Blea paid a visit to Del Charro Saloon, where all was well. Griego congratulated the manager on improving operations at the bar and moved on.

Blea, 50, is an eighth-degree black belt in the martial art of kajukemdo and also works as a defensive tactics and firearms instructor at the police academy. He started at SID two months ago, and previously worked for 10 years in law enforcement at the state Office of Inspector General.

During the course of the night, the two agents visited Fusion, Evangelo’s Cocktail Lounge, The Matador, the Eldorado Hotel and then Fusion again.

Griego said he quit drinking for Lent years ago — partially because he didn’t like the atmosphere in bars — and decided to make it a permanent decision. He never imagined he would later end up spending several nights a week working in bars, he said.

Griego worked in law enforcement at the state Motor Transportation Division before coming to SID five years ago.

During his first visit to Fusion, Griego scrutinized a patron who had a drink in front of him, but Griego didn’t cite the bar on a charge of serving an intoxicated person because the man wasn’t obviously drunk. “It was a borderline case,” he said.

The agents waited outside with the man until a friend came to pick him up. During the wait, it became more apparent that the man had had too much to drink. At one point he threw a cigarette butt on the ground and tried to put it out with his foot, but missed and almost lost his footing. With a look of intent concentration, he finally put it out.

Later at Evangelo’s, Griego and Blea waited as a man went to get his car so he could give his drunken girlfriend a ride home. She didn’t have a drink in front of her, but Griego, Blea and Nick Klonis, who runs the bar for his mother, wanted to make sure she got home safely.

At The Matador, Fiesta revelers were lined up 10 deep to go down the stairs to the basement bar, which features vintage punk-rock posters from bands such as the Lunachicks and The Cramps. Inside the bar, it was so packed that Griego and Blea called the fire marshal.

Since Annette Lujan had — half in jest — asked the agents not to return after their first visit, Griego made a point of going back to Fusion again that night. As he and Blea walked up the stairs shortly after 1 a.m., a security guard picked up the microphone to his radio and started talking. He nodded to Blea and kept his eyes on them as they walked up the stairs.

Blea said it was likely the guard was warning someone inside that the agents were back, but Blea didn’t mind. He was getting used to that kind of reception, he said.

Inside, Blea and Griego stayed until closing but didn’t find any problems. After they left, they checked to make sure other downtown bars had shut down by the mandatory 2 a.m. closing time.

Griego said he had issued a couple of citations the night before, but this night was relatively uneventful.

Industry backlash

Sen. Mary Jane Garcia, D-Doña Ana, a co-owner of Victoria’s nightclub in Las Cruces, said she has received a lot of calls from people in the liquor industry who are concerned about recent actions of SID agents.

“I don’t think they know how to deal with business people,” Garcia said.

Garcia said she would like the agents to be more fair in the places they target, and treat business owners with more dignity.

“Don’t just barge in and say, ‘This person is drunk because I say so,’ ” Garcia said. “They’re intimidating the industry to a large degree.”

Garcia said it is getting difficult to find wait staff and bartenders because they’re afraid of receiving a citation. “We’re all being as responsible as we can,” Garcia said. “None of us support the carnage on the road.”

She claimed gross-receipts taxes are going down because fewer people are going out. “People are just plain scared to go out any more,” she said.

This fall, the Legislative Finance Committee plans to hold a meeting about liquor-license issues, she said.

Garcia said she wasn’t present in Victoria’s in May when SID agents cited the nightclub on a charge of selling to an intoxicated person. The nightclub ended up paying $1,000 and shutting down for one night, Garcia said.

One of the agents present that night was Sgt. Conrad Chavira, 45, a former SID agent who resigned this month after he was charged with drunken driving in Ruidoso, according to state records and the SID chief, Herman Silva.

“They’re supposed to be the ones out there enforcing the laws, and they’re out there getting drunk themselves,” Garcia said.

She said she has had a good relationship with SID agents and would support hiring more, but she wants the state to make sure they don’t have a history of alcohol problems.

Stretched thin

The Special Investigations Division currently has eight vacancies, including one in Santa Fe. Recruiting is difficult, according to Silva, because the division competes with other, better-paying law-enforcement agencies for recruits.

SID agents are certified police officers but not graduates of the State Police Training Academy. Pay starts at $17.02 an hour without experience, said Peter Olson, spokesman for the state Department of Safety. Those with experience start at $18.40 an hour.

SID’s pay is sometimes between $4 and $6 an hour less than that of other law-enforcement agencies, Silva said.

By comparison, a starting patrolman with the New Mexico State Police makes $17.48 an hour, according to the department’s Web site. At the Santa Fe Police Department, recruits make $15.13 an hour once they graduate from the police academy and $18.01 after their first year, said Deputy Police Chief Benjie Montaño. New hires in Hobbs make even more — $20.39 — according to Kristie Kemp, an administrative secretary at the department.

In the last year, Silva said, agents have been doing a lot of work in the Santa Fe area. However, because of work in the Grants area, agents weren’t able to make it to the Santa Fe Muzik Fest in August, which attracted 10,000 people a day to The Downs at Santa Fe and included nine public-celebration liquor licenses.

Santa Fe County became a target for enforcement after a Nov. 11 crash that killed six people, including the drunken driver, on Interstate 25. For last year as a whole, however, Santa Fe County had the lowest citation rate of six New Mexico counties with high DWI rates, according to numbers The New Mexican compiled from state liquor-license and citation information.

That trend has continued through August, with McKinley County having a nearly 1-to-1 ratio for citations to liquor establishments and Santa Fe County’s numbers coming in at less than a third of that rate, according to the numbers.

Santa Fe’s low ratio, however, could partially be because of the high number of liquor licenses here. There are 245 booze and restaurant licenses in Santa Fe County, and 63 in McKinley County, according to a state list.

Silva said the numbers could indicate that liquor licensees are following the laws, but it can also reflect the level of enforcement efforts in a given area.

A new “three strikes and you’re out” law for liquor licensees has added to the agency’s burden, Silva said.

The law, which became effective last October, says bars and restaurants will lose their licenses if they’re convicted of three or more alcohol citations in a year. Earlier this month, the state announced that the Regulation & Licensing Department plans to use the law for the first time to try to revoke the licenses of six bars and restaurants in Farmington and Gallup.

Edward Lopez, superintendent of the state Regulation & Licensing Department, said more licensees have been contesting citations since the three-strikes law became effective. In the past, owners faced less of a threat to keeping their licenses, which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Under the previous regulation, they didn’t have to worry about losing their license until they had received four or five citations in a 12-month period, but now they’re taking it seriously after the first and sometimes the second citation,” Lopez said.

Silva said this means that SID agents are spending a lot more time in administrative hearings than they used to under the old rules.

Agents are trying to do a better job of targeting bars and restaurants, and that is what Fell recommends for cash-strapped states. “Most communities have problem bars, but usually 90 percent of liquor establishments are run responsibly,” said Fell at Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation. An efficient way to run liquor-enforcement operations, Fell said, is to find the 10 percent of establishments that aren’t run responsibly and then target them. “That way you can whittle it down to a few bars and start citing them,” he said.

Still, Griego said, “We could use more people, without a doubt. We’ve got a lot of liquor licenses and cover a lot of territory.”

Contact Wendy Brown at 986-3072 or wbrown@sfnewmexican.com.

The numbers

The ratio of alcohol outlets to alcohol-enforcement field agents varies tremendously throughout the country, according to a 2005 report by the Center for the Study of Law and Enforcement Policy.

The lowest rate was 48 outlets per agent in Mississippi, and the highest rate was 7,083 outlets per agent in Wisconsin, according to the report.

In New Mexico, there are about 57 outlets per agent.

But in neighboring states — Texas, Arizona and Colorado — there are even fewer agents per liquor license. In Texas, there is one agent for every 138 liquor licenses; in Arizona there is one agent for every 531 licenses; and in Colorado there is one agent for every 833 licenses, according to information from officials in those states.

With regard to state rankings for drunken-driving fatalities, Arizona was ranked sixth in the country, New Mexico eighth, Texas 16th and Colorado 31st. Mississippi ranked fifth and Wisconsin 22nd.