Daily Lobo Turns on the Lights

Government transparency is a funny thing.    

Not really. It’s deeply serious, and often, the struggle for it makes me want to bang my head against six or seven different walls. But it’s interesting because of how tightly intertwined it is with journalism, and how difficult it is to achieve — especially as a student working at a college newspaper. This is a double-edged sword: To reveal some great hidden truth makes for the best story, but to get there can take weeks, months or a lawsuit.   

I’ve been thinking a lot about my legacy as editor in chief of the Daily Lobo, with graduation inching closer. Reaching for transparency, over the past year, has been a common thread through much of my work. It’s come to feel like a lighthouse, or Polaris — a sort of guiding light that I paddle toward. And then my paddle breaks in half, or my boat gets tipped by a sea monster with many unblinking eyes.   

The Daily Lobo’s reporting on body-worn cameras for University of New Mexico Police Department officers began when Lauren Lifke and I received a tip from a lawyer that the department may not have been using them properly. After a slew of public records requests, we learned it wasn’t that the officers were failing to click the devices on and off properly — they didn’t have them at all. A potential, albeit unintentional loophole in the state’s body camera law cracked the door just wide enough for UNMPD to leave cameras out of its toolkit. (Notably, the New Mexico State University police force has been using the devices for over a decade.)   

From there, I became curious about other aspects of UNMPD’s operations. Without body camera video, the puzzle of each police-public interaction was missing several pieces. We had police reports featuring officers’ narratives, but every good journalist knows that fact-checking is as important as breathing — especially if it’s information from a person in power. Beyond that, the department’s Standard Operating Procedures manual was not publicly available online, which left the puzzle even less complete. That changed when I requested a copy.   

In November 2023, I filed a request for UNMPD’s weapons inventory. Shortly thereafter, I received a full denial of that request under an exception to the state Inspection of Public Records Act reserved for information that could, if published, “facilitate the planning or execution of a terrorist attack.”   

That felt odd. And it was, because a mentor then showed me a 2015 judge’s decision that deemed the Albuquerque Police Department’s weapons inventory public record after a similar situation with a different journalist. I sued UNM’s records custodian in March 2024 for the documents. Litigation remains ongoing, and a trial is set for September if a judge doesn’t make a decision over the summer. I am beyond grateful for the opportunity and support to take legal action. Not everyone, especially in a student newsroom, gets that.   

By many accounts, truth-telling is journalism’s main goal. And truth-telling runs into walls without transparency. Though New Mexico has strong sunshine laws, which can help when the waves get especially rough, it’s still often difficult to access the information the Daily Lobo needs for its journalism.    Here’s an example: For months after our first investigative story involving UNMPD, which exposed the university’s violations of the Clery Act, Lauren and I largely lost access to officers. Phone calls, voicemails and emails yielded nothing. I paced the newsroom. Why wouldn’t these university officials talk to us? And later: Why would they talk to other news organizations, but not us?   

It makes sense that journalists have largely contentious relationships with people in power. The opposite would be — and is, with some journalists — problematic. Our job is to hold these people accountable. That can be annoying, if you are these people. But that’s how it is. When you sign up for a job that affects people, you must answer to them — and that includes journalists, who will fact-check you, find other sources, file public records requests and compile your answers into a concise, digestible, accurate package for the public. 

All that being said, I love a challenge. 

– Lily Alexander, Editor in Chief, Daily Lobo