A good test of police officers is whether they treat one of their own as they would someone else who’s intoxicated and instigates a domestic disturbance.
Police in Los Alamos failed in just such a case. They admitted giving preferential treatment to an officer from the neighboring Santa Fe Police Department.
The onetime police chief of Santa Fe passed his test, recommending the offending officer be fired. He was overruled by then-City Manager Jarel LaPan Hill.
This case stretching across two years centers on misconduct by Laura Gluvna, a Santa Fe police officer. Gluvna, 33, received extraordinary leniency thanks to the wide blue line extending from one police jurisdiction to another.
Gluvna on Dec. 5, 2020, was scheduled to work the graveyard shift. She texted then-Sgt. Craig Davis of the Santa Fe Police Department to tell him she wouldn’t arrive for duty. “Hey Serg. I need to call in tonight. There is something that came up tonight that I need to deal with,” Gluvna wrote.
About 3 p.m., less than an hour after sending that message, Gluvna drove her personal vehicle to Los Alamos to visit her former live-in boyfriend. He did not want to see her. The man was in the Jemez Mountains with his 12-year-old daughter, looking for a Christmas tree.
Gluvna would estimate she arrived in Los Alamos about 4 p.m. and texted her ex-boyfriend. He told her not to come to his residence.
“Officer Gluvna ignored that request,” states an internal affairs report by Santa Fe police Capt. Aaron Ortiz. Gluvna wasn’t deterred. She informed her ex-boyfriend she would wait for him at his home.
An ugly encounter ensued. The former boyfriend described Gluvna as “completely [expletive]-faced drunk,” according to the internal affairs documents. He would later retract his comment during Ortiz’s investigation. By then, the former boyfriend understood Gluvna could be fired.
An important question was whether Gluvna was intoxicated on her drive from Santa Fe to Los Alamos. Corporals with the Los Alamos police said during the internal affairs investigation they didn’t know, as they lacked statements from anyone saying she’d been driving in that condition.
For her part, Gluvna in a later memo to her supervisors stated she began drinking beer in her car while waiting in her ex-boyfriend’s driveway.
A former administrator with the Santa Fe Police Department reviewed all the records in this case. He told me a motorist drinking alcohol in a parked vehicle, keys at the ready, typically would be in trouble. “Anyone else would have been arrested,” the administrator said.
Gluvna refused to leave her ex-boyfriend’s home, saying she was so intoxicated she could not drive safely. He agreed to let her sleep off her drunkenness in his guest room. Trouble between them escalated as the hours passed, according to the internal affairs report by Ortiz.
About 10:30 p.m., the former boyfriend dialed 911 and asked for Los Alamos police officers’ help in removing Gluvna from his home.
“She’s blocking me in. I don’t want to get near her,” the man told a dispatcher. The former boyfriend four more times told Gluvna to move out of his way so he could walk outside.
“Each request … was met with refusal from Officer Gluvna,” Capt. Ortiz stated. “In the 911 call, it clearly sounds that Officer Gluvna is in fact blocking, preventing or restraining [the boyfriend] from going outside. This allegation was never investigated by the responding officers at the time.”
Los Alamos police officers separated Gluvna from her ex-boyfriend. Police told Gluvna to go outside, where Cpl. Robert Larsen watched her. Another row followed.
Larsen’s body camera showed the former boyfriend entering a garage and retrieving a pack of beer that Gluvna said belonged to her. Gluvna’s mother was on her way to pick up the intoxicated police officer. Cpl. Larsen said the beer would be given to Gluvna’s mother, but it would not be provided to Gluvna herself.
Gluvna cursed the corporal. Larsen ordered her to move away from the garage and sit behind her vehicle. She refused and they argued.
“Do what I told you to, or I’m going to put you in cuffs,” Larsen said.
“Stop touching me!” Gluvna replied, spraying profanity into her many protests.
Another Los Alamos police corporal, Robert Stephens, said Gluvna refused other commands intended to keep her away from her former boyfriend. For instance, she defied officers by returning to the garage, where the beer was stored.
But the officers did not arrest Gluvna. They were deferential toward her because she was a fellow officer.
“Umm, we kind of gave her a little more leeway than maybe we would have with somebody else,” Stephens said in his interview for the internal affairs investigation. “Just because she was an officer and we were trying to give her a little break, but she again kind of was just being a little just defiant and not listening to what we were trying to tell her to do.”
Their soft treatment saved Gluvna’s career. “Other officers would have been fired immediately if they were involved in a domestic violence situation similar to Gluvna’s,” said the former Santa Fe police administrator who reviewed her case.
Gluvna did not respond to requests for comment. She spoke with Capt. Ortiz during the internal investigation. Ortiz asked Gluvna if she pulled away from Cpl. Larsen. “I remember being very upset,” she said, evading the question.
Gluvna shifted from diversion to admitting limited culpability. “I know that I [expletive] up, but the whole situation was such [expletive] that I was blacked out. Not just from the booze.”
Los Alamos police allowed Gluvna to leave with her mother after the blowup. Gluvna returned to work the next day. She then listed a sick day for the shift she spent in confrontations with her ex-boyfriend and Los Alamos police officers.
Ortiz said Gluvna improperly claimed sick time. But he decided not to sustain that complaint against her. Her sergeant approved the sick leave, so Gluvna wasn’t entirely responsible, at least not in the world of police investigating fellow officers.
Ortiz sustained four of the seven policy violations charged against Gluvna. They included conduct unbecoming a police officer and Gluvna failing to obey criminal laws. She was not exonerated of any allegation. But in three instances, Ortiz did not sustain the misconduct complaints.
Then-Chief Andrew Padilla recommended Gluvna be fired. She appealed. LaPan Hill, then the city manager, considered the proposed penalty excessive.
“After reviewing all the documents and information provided, I have decided to reduce the recommendation of termination to a 30-day suspension without pay,” LaPan Hill wrote in a four-paragraph letter to Gluvna.
The case did not end there. The New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy Board this year suspended Gluvna’s certification for 60 days.
Santa Fe’s sitting police chief, Paul Joye, told me Gluvna used 141 hours of accrued leave while she was banned from doing police work. Once her leave was exhausted, Gluvna went unpaid for about 90 hours.
City Manager John Blair told me he approved Gluvna being on paid leave during most of the period when her law enforcement certification was suspended. Blair declined to discuss his decision.
In all, the domestic violence case cost Gluvna 39 days’ pay. She makes $29.52 an hour, according to city records.
She still carries a badge, a gun and a duty. She’s supposed to abide by and enforce the law, two myths of her own case.
