- An off-duty New Mexico State Police captain was pulled over by a security guard named Ronald Portillo who was impersonating a police officer on Interstate 40, violating New Mexico law by using unauthorized flashing lights on his truck.
Picture merging onto Interstate 40 outside Albuquerque and catching lights in your mirror, blue up front, red in back, the universal signal that somebody official wants you pulled over. That’s what happened to an off-duty New Mexico State Police captain on November 4, 2023, except the person flashing those lights wasn’t a cop. He was a security guard named Ronald Portillo, and the traffic stop he tried to run on a real police captain turned into one of the more instructive bodycam videos to come out of New Mexico in years, not because of how badly it went for Portillo, but because of how many laws he had already broken before anyone asked for his ID.
The captain’s own account, given to the responding troopers and captured on their bodycam, described a vehicle behind him running blue lights up front and red lights in back while trailing him down I-40. He started easing toward the shoulder, assuming the unfamiliar truck belonged to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office. The instant he moved to pull over, the lights shut off and the truck kept driving, an odd bit of behavior that mattered a lot once real state police got involved, since a legitimate stop doesn’t get aborted the moment a driver actually responds. The captain radioed it in, and units caught up with Portillo after he had continued on to a property he said he had been hired to patrol.
Portillo didn’t make the encounter easy once troopers arrived. He argued that the captain hadn’t shown a badge before flashing his own lights, declared “I’m in charge of this right now” because the conversation had drifted onto private property, and refused to hand over his driver’s license. State police explained that withholding ID during a lawful stop would get him arrested immediately. He resisted anyway, and once he was in cuffs, he pivoted to critiquing the officers’ arrest technique, a move that has never once talked anybody out of handcuffs…