Early in his law enforcement career, Eddy County sheriff’s Capt. Eric Threlkeld didn’t know much about domestic violence.
But he knew his approach wasn’t working.
He would respond to domestic violence calls alone, making it impossible to interview people separately. He would question survivors of abuse about why they wouldn’t leave their partners. He would threaten arrests after returning to the same homes again and again. He now trains officers across New Mexico not to do these things.
“For the last 20 years or so, a great part of what I focus on is intimate partner violence and understanding that it is a pattern of behavior and not an incident-based crime,” Threlkeld said.
The trouble, he said, is there’s “no consistency” across New Mexico law enforcement agencies on how that behavior pattern is documented and publicly reported. This means some agencies aren’t tracking escalating signs of violence or intervening in cases to prevent future harm — sometimes with deadly consequences.
While data on the prevalence of domestic violence in the state is severely limited — as many incidents go unreported and a high rate of cases go unprosecuted — a federal survey published earlier this year indicates such crimes are troublingly common: Nearly 39% of New Mexico women have experienced abuse by an intimate partner, the report estimates.
Threlkeld chaired a state panel last year that annually reviews homicides and suicides related to sexual assault or domestic violence. Its 2025 report found a history of intimate partner violence in more than three-quarters of the deaths, and noted half the couples involved had one or more past reports of domestic violence.
The New Mexico Intimate Partner Violence Death Review Team had examined 28 deaths in 26 cases that occurred or were solved by police in 2021 for its fiscal year 2025 report, which urged law enforcement agencies to establish consistent and clear protocols for investigating and documenting incidents related to domestic violence. It also called on the New Mexico Legislature to standardize police documentation of calls for service that involve allegations of abuse.
“The outcomes of domestic violence situations are often predictable,” Threlkeld said. “And if it’s predictable, it can be preventable.”
Assessing the prevalence
“You definitely know somebody who’s been affected by domestic violence, even if you don’t know it,” said Amy Kindrick, executive director of S.A.F.E House Inc., a domestic violence shelter in Albuquerque.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a major source of federal domestic violence data published in February, estimates about 39% of women in the state — around 315,000 — have experienced sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner at some time in their lives.
The survey found 35% of New Mexico women — or about 281,000 — had experienced “psychological aggression” from a partner, including efforts to threaten, coerce, humiliate or isolate them.
Those experiences can have widespread effects in survivors’ lives. About 282,000 women in the state reported being fearful, having injuries, experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, needing medical care, filing a police report, or missing at least one day of work or school as a result of sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by a partner.
The same survey estimates about 1 in 6 American men have experienced sexual violence, physical violence or stalking from a partner; it doesn’t specify the percentage of New Mexico men who have reported such experiences.
Statewide data sheds more light on the frequency of domestic violence: The New Mexico Crime Victimization Survey, published in September 2024 and prepared by independent researchers for the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs, said 19% of survey respondents reported experiencing physical or emotional abuse by a partner within one year of being surveyed.
Those estimates are probably undercounts, Kindrick said.
In reality, she said, “Everywhere you go — to church, to school, to work … you’re with somebody that’s been impacted by domestic violence.”
At its most extreme, domestic violence is deadly.
In the 28 fatalities the domestic violence review team examined in fiscal year 2025, 85% of the perpetrators had a known history of violence against intimate partners.
Half had been arrested on suspicion of domestic violence and 27% convicted at least once.
Half of the cases the team reviewed involved friends, family or community members who were aware of prior abuse — but didn’t recognize it or report it as such.
Had these warning signs been heeded, the team’s report noted, “Many of these deaths could have been prevented.”
Improving data collection
When Threlkeld started his law enforcement career in Alamogordo, he said, he, like most police officers, received very little training on domestic violence.
“I didn’t grow up in a violent home, so my first exposure to it was as a police officer,” he said. “I just remember in the early days being sort of flabbergasted at why people would stay in those violent situations — because I didn’t really understand the dynamics.”
That changed as he worked his way up to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he became part of a specialized unit called the Domestic Violence Enhanced Response Team.
The experience taught him to take a broader, multidisciplinary approach to domestic violence investigations. Rather than focusing on a single incident — Has a crime occurred? Is there enough evidence to make an arrest? — Threlkeld learned to look at patterns that could be warning signs of domestic violence.
“We have to understand the whole story of what’s going on in these families — looking at those patterns of behavior; looking for the coercive, controlling behavior; looking for those high risk of lethality behaviors,” he said. “We’re not going to get that on every call if we’re not asking questions about it.”
But not all officers ask those questions, Threlkeld said, nor is there a statewide mandate requiring consistent labeling and reporting of domestic violence incidents. What one officer might label as a “disturbance,” for instance, another might call domestic violence. Another officer might think — erroneously — domestic violence is limited to physical violence, when the label can be applied to verbal altercations and other behaviors, too.
Threlkeld and the Intimate Partner Violence Death Review Team argue better policy could fix some of those problems.
The team issued dozens of recommendations to improve domestic violence responses across the Legislature, law enforcement, the courts, victims services organizations, and medical and behavioral health systems.
Many of those recommendations focused on ensuring signs of escalating violence are documented by police — whether they make an arrest or not.
The team’s report encourages the Legislature to pass a law requiring police officers to document all incidents of abuse during all domestic violence calls for service, even those that don’t result in an arrest.
It points to an existing requirement for medical providers, who must record the nature of the abuse and the name of the alleged perpetrator.
The report also urges lawmakers to create and fund a task force to evaluate and recommend a uniform lethality assessment — or a standardized tool to identify people at high risk of serious injury and death — for use in all New Mexico jurisdictions.
Uniform practices would help identify patterns of domestic violence and provide a more complete picture of the problem in New Mexico — and implementing them is “not that hard,” Threlkeld said. Almost every law enforcement agency in the state has a records management system that could handle that data.
Police only know the extent of the problem, he said, “if we’re keeping accurate records and we’re making sure we’re categorizing these cases appropriately.”
