New Mexico is divided into twelve districts. These Districts are used for State Police organization, and SAR is organized under the Department of Public Safety (DPS) together with State Police, so SAR response is organized along district lines as well. Each district has a single Field Coordinator on duty at any given time, ready to become the Incident Commander if a mission arises. Field Coordinators can travel widely to assist other districts if necessary. There is a single on-duty Area Commander at any time, overseeing all missions across the entire state. However, district boundaries are largely transparent to teams—teams can go wherever they’re requested (dependent on distance of course).
The state is further divided into three “communication” regions: north, central and south, aka NORCOM, CENCOM and SOCOM, each with its own dispatch center for handling the districts in that region.
We have two useful maps for district boundaries:
- The one visible below is from NM DOT and is available as a jpg download.
- We put together a caltopo website version which includes the boundaries for NORCOM, CENCOM, and SOCOM as well.
