“It’s not just the Albuquerque Police Department,” the caller told me before narrating his own tale of a violent encounter with law enforcement. His story involved a Sandoval County sheriff’s deputy, but it was a story that could have been about a state policeman or a local cop just about anywhere in New Mexico.
His story started with work on his home phone by a repairman on his roof. The repairman apparently inadvertently triggered a 911 call that the deputy responded to.
The deputy knocked on this man’s door, said there had been a 911 call and demanded entrance. The man said there was no problem and refused entrance. The deputy, according to the man, then attacked him and forced his way in. He found nothing amiss. However, my caller, an anesthesiologist, said his hand was injured in the fray, an injury that jeopardized his ability to do his job.
This caller was not looking for money or publicity or revenge or even justice. He did not tell me his name or the name of the deputy, and he has not filed a lawsuit or a criminal complaint.
He just wanted me to know that he had read a column I wrote recently about the U.S. Department of Justice investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department and that the problem of excessive violence did not stop with the Duke City. “It’s everywhere,” he told me.
When you watch TV news and read newspapers and web sites from around the state, it’s hard to disagree with the anesthesiologist’s conclusion. The state police, for example, have killed three suspects recently, two of them in a single week. (In one widely publicized incident in Santa Fe County, a state cop stopped a woman for a minor traffic offense and then shot at her when she drove off. She was killed by his bullets. He is still on duty.
In other incidents in recent days, state police shot men outside their homes in Las Vegas and Los Lunas. The shootings apparently came after reports of domestic disputes.
Areas all over the state are reporting seemingly needless violence by law enforcement officers on a weekly, sometimes a daily basis.
A good part of the reason is the training of these officers. Most are trained by the academies run by the state police and APD. These academies and the law enforcement officers themselves admit to several lacunae in their training. They are not adequately taught how to recognize and deal nonviolently with the mentally ill, who account for many of their victims. An official of the Bernalillo County Detention Center admits that over half of the some 2,000 inmates are mentally ill. A state police official confessed last week that officers are not trained to incapacitate rather than to kill a potentially violent suspect. Once a police officer feels threatened by a violent, aggressive or armed suspect, he is trained to shoot to kill. This helps explain why 24 of the 39 suspects shot by APD since 2010 were killed.
Such problems are so widespread in New Mexico that they would seem to demand a statewide response, by the governor the attorney general and the Legislature. If police training and practices become a campaign issue in this year’s elections, which just got under way last week with primary early voting, maybe something will happen. Maybe there will be a real statewide investigation. Maybe there will be changes in training, recruitment and policies.
“If it bleeds, it leads,” has long been a mantra of TV news, especially in New Mexico. But it used to be those who bled were largely the victims of bad guys, the murderers, rapists, gangsters and thugs who victimized the innocent. Now, more often than not, the bleeders are ordinary citizens caught up in mazes of family disputes, drunkenness, drug use and mental illness. And those who cause them to bleed are the ones the taxpayers pay for protection.
But here is what makes this problem even more difficult to understand or remedy: It’s not just New Mexico. A Texas town is in an uproar because a Hearne city policeman killed a 93-year-old woman after a dispute over renewing a driver’s license.
In Kansas City, police killing of an unarmed stock broker has sparked an investigation. Congress is investigating excessive violence by Dallas cops. The Department of Justice on Thursday launched an investigation of shootings by the Miami Police Department.
Customs and Border Control agents just settled a lawsuit in El Paso for forcing six hours of unjustified body cavity searches on an unoffending 54-year-old New Mexico woman. No charges were ever filed against her. Reported incidents of aggressive even violent behavior by law enforcement officials along the international border continue to multiply.
The plethora of violent incidents suggests the need for the federal government to conduct a nationwide investigation of how and why and when law enforcement officers at all levels use force.
That unreasonable and excessive violence is a policing problem at levels and in numerous jurisdictions suggests problems that go beyond individuals or even single institutions. It may be, as some police suggest, that defense lawyers are becoming more aggressive about pursing civil rights violations and the fees that lawsuits bring. It may be that the militarization of police equipment, armaments and training incline them toward greater use of force. It may be that the ubiquity of guns encourages police to conclude that just about every suspect is dangerous and armed, often with weapons of greater fire power than the police themselves have, and so they tend to react quickly and lethally before giving an incident a chance to be resolved peacefully. The Justice Department noted that the presence and behavior of APD at a crime scene often escalates rather than deescalates an incident, converting potential conflict into real violence. It may also be true that those victimized by these incidents are more willing to come forward now than in the past.
What makes the whole APD mess even more extraordinary is that according to just about every law enforcement official and outside observer, APD is not only the largest but also the best trained, best equipped and most professional law enforcement organization in the state.
Clearly there is greater attention to the issue of police aggression now than at any time in the recent past, and my colleagues in the press deserve some credit for that. The only action my anesthesiologist caller asked me to take was to “keep on writing.” I hope my colleagues will, too.
(Photo by Thom Chandler)
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