Your Voice, Your Vote: Doa Ana County Sheriff’s race

Candidates for DoaAna County Sheriff Craig Buckingham and Enrique “Kiki” Vigil are both vying to be the county’s next sheriff.

Current Sheriff, Todd Garrison is term-limited.

Both candidates say they are confident they can lead the department.

Craig Buckingham is currently a captain in the department and has worked there since 1996.

Vigil has both local and federal law experience. He’s a retired deputy for the U.S Marshal’s service with 25 years experience.

One of the biggest issues in this race, involves recent reports that the department has issued the majority of traffic citations in the city of Las Cruces, with little attention to unincorporated areas in the county.

Vigil says the department has become a “traffic division.” He says he recently obtained an email from within the department, which urged deputies to issue a specific number of citations in a given day. Vigil says deputies feel pressured to maintain what he calls, a “quota.”

“When you have more drivers in the city of Las Cruces, they have a tendency to hang around the city of Las Cruces, because it’s fresh catch,” Vigil said.

Vigil also says if elected, deputies will patrol more in areas such as Hatch, Chaparral and in smaller communities that do not have its own police force like in Las Cruces.

Buckingham maintains the department is doing its job and says traffic citations help clear court systems of warrants and find wanted criminals.

“It’s more than patrol guys running tickets. Down south, we’re 1/3 of the workforce, we have 1/3 of the work so roughly 1/3 of citations come from that area or roughly close to that,” Buckingham said.

A concern Buckingham addressed, was that the he has named an undersheriff, Albert Mora, and says Vigil has not and needs to do the same.

“I think the public needs to know who number 2 is and I’m the only candidate that at this point has done that,” Buckingham said.

Vigil, however, says he depends on his own credentials.

“I’m running based on my own credentials. I do not need to rely on anyone’s credentials the buck stops with me. It’s not your undersheriff that is on the ballot,” Vigil said.

Another area of concern, a recent an internal survey found employees thought the department was suffering from low morale.Buckingham acknowledges the internal issues but says other than that, the department is doing just fine.

“We got hard working people over there, we need to fix a couple of things, for sure internally, but externally, our crime numbers have been going down for the last 2 years,” Buckingham said.

But Vigil says it’s evident the department is not doing just fine and says the employees need new leadership.

“They need to be treated with dignity, respect and fairness, that’s all they’re asking and if I’m elected, that will be the recipe,” Vigil said.

Election day is November 4th.