New Mexico Mercury

Trained to See Some People as Scum that ain’t Worth the Trouble

If James Boyd had been a bear they would have shot him with a tranquilizer dart.

But Boyd was a different kind of animal. The police had been trained, it appears, to see him as a piece of trash, as vermin, as scum not worth the trouble to subdue.

And it’s all on video. A new snuff film from the Albuquerque Police Department. A minute or two of what the poet C.R. Lloyd called “pornographias del muerto.”

Watching it can be a nightmare experience, a peep hole into the Devil’s World.  I felt obliged to view it numerous times, so I could be as accurate as possible writing about it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

Such horrendous, gratuitous violence. It could have been a training film for how to be cowardly bullies.

It comes down to this. Six or so Albuquerque police officers and one 38 year old homeless hobo in the foothills of the Sandias. He had a history. Police said they thought he was a paranoid schizophrenic. He is said to have been obnoxious with the police before and once he reportedly broke the nose of a female police officer. And now he was disturbing the neighbors by camping illegally in the foothills.

And that’s what it takes to get unofficially executed in Albuquerque. No death row here. We prefer instant injustice.

The city is outraged. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating. Politicians have gone on record as being appalled.  A petition is floating around to recall the mayor. The new police chief is wearing a cloaking device. Are the unofficial executioners in jail on probable cause of murder, held without bond? No, justice for them will be slow as cooling lava oozing over the corpse of James Boyd.

In the video, the cops seemed tense. I’d even say they appeared terrified.  When Boyd had agreed to go with them, after apparently lengthy negotiations, he said “I’m not a F…ing murderer. I’m not going to harm you. Don’t worry about safety” As he turned to get his gear, a voice said “Do it.” Someone shot a flash blast round at Boyd’s feet and set the dog on him. They yelled at him to get on the ground. He turned to them. He seemed dazed and incredulous even from a distance. He wasn’t making a threatening a move at them. He turned his back as if taking a step to get away from the dog. Then two cops shot him six times. He fell on his face. “Drop the knife, drop the knife,” the cops yelled. But his body lay across his arm. He could have done nothing with the knife. “Drop the knife,” the cops kept screaming as if the thing were a hand grenade. If you listen carefully to the video, Boyd says, his face in the dirt, “Please don’t hurt me.”  The cops keep screaming, “drop the knife, drop the knife.” Boyd’s blood is on a rock above his head. They hit him with rounds of beanbags blasted from a shotgun just after that, while he’s down. Beanbags don’t contain beans. They are cloth bags filled with lead shot. It’s like being hit hard with a nightstick. They can cause muscle spasms. If you’re hit in the wrong place, they can kill you.

Boyd did have a knife or two.  He did have a history. But, as I said, he wasn’t charging the officers. They were all armed with high powered firearms and a “K9 officer.” These are strong young men. Boyd was a mentally ill, slightly portly homeless person. They could have subdued him in moments.

Boyd’s fatal mistake was he trusted them. “Don’t get stupid,” he said “Don’t change the agreement. I’m going to try to walk with you.”

Before he knows it, he’s got six slugs in him. They shot him in the back. And then they left him on the ground bleeding to death while they fretted about the knife and searched his belongings. There’s no way to tell, so far, how long they waited before they called to evacuate him to a hospital. He reportedly died the next day. The timing from the shots to his death needs to be figured out precisely.

It’s all on the video. Probably tens of thousands of people have seen this killing, this murder, by now. It’s on the BBC going around the world. Probably hundreds of thousands more will see it.

It was the first time for many of us to watch a person being killed. It will always haunt me… Apparently even Albuquerque’s mayor found it “horrific” and “unsettling” to watch. If understatement were an iceberg, that should sink the Titanic and the mayor’s career.

The video makes it clear that James Boyd thought he was in a conversation. But the cops were just waiting to whack him. Watch the video as many times as you can bear to. It all comes clear.  He thought they were negotiating. They were just waiting for an opening.

Will this become a Rodney King moment for the APD and our city? Will this video be the turning point in a four-year long shooting spree by the APD in which 36 civilians have been shot and 22 of them killed? Will the officers involved be indicted? Will the permissive local courts and blind-eye District Attorney’s office, let them go with a slap on the wrist? Will Albuquerqueans then riot like residents did in LA in 1992 after the state courts there acquitted the cops who beat Rodney King nearly to death? Fifty eight people were killed in that riot.

The police are saying Boyd threatened to kill them. How might he have done that? The Sandia Foothills bristled with guns, all pointed at him. He had told them, it’s on the video, that if they were in “private life in a bar” or at a bus stop, armed to the teeth like that he’d have a right “to kill” them, presumably in self-defense. That was a stupid thing for him to say. But he wasn’t in his right mind. And it couldn’t have been mistaken for a valid threat.

On the video James Boyd doesn’t appear to be in touch with reality. He’s irritated with all the cops hassling him with guns. He apparently doesn’t think they’ll try to kill him and succeed. He didn’t really get it until they got him. He didn’t really get it that they had judged him, convicted him and were about to execute him. They seemed to think it was their right to do that.

Why they did kill James Boyd when the Justice Department is still investigating the other civilian killings by police here?

Why did the department release the video? Could it be that the hierarchy there thought the shooting really was justified? That the video wasn’t incriminating? That Mr. Boyd was a piece of social detritus that no one should think twice about killing?

Is that what they think? Is that what the cop bosses tell their young officers?

Is that what they learn at the academy? Are they taught there’s a class of worthless people who don’t matter, who don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, who don’t deserve to be treated with the respect of a full human being? Who don’t deserve the law? Do they teach that about crazy people, drunk people, poor people, eccentric people, or old people who are unkempt and don’t wipe the chili from their shirts?

James Boyd did not have “cop killer” tattooed on his arm. He did not steal a police car, he did not lead officers on a wild chase through the North Valley, as a heavily armed Christopher Chase did late last year. He did not shoot and wound three police officers and one sheriff’s deputy. When the police cornered him, they knew he was out for their blood, and the blood of innocent bystanders that his bullets might hit.  I believe they shot him eight times. The cops in the Sandia Foothills shot James Boyd six times. He had no gun. He’d hurt no one. He endangered no lives.

Police officers, whether they are taught this or not, represent the sacred order of the rule of law which is based on the deepest values of our Constitutional culture – equal justice under law. Police have to be held to the highest standards, not only as models of fairness and the respect of individual rights that goes with it, but also as fallible human beings invested with the vast power of the state, and armed with weapons only they can fire legally in public. And even when they do, their actions must be scrutinized without bias for their office.

When cops become objects of fear that means the government can’t control them, can’t train them, or doesn’t want to. And those who run that government have become lethally incompetent or are complicit and culpable.

Many people in the APD appear to think nothing about the rule of law.  To be fair, the police officers I’ve encountered both personally, and as a police reporter long ago, generally have held themselves to a higher standard and often with great courage. But when there are rogues in the police force, or when the whole organization seems to have turned rogue, as much of ours apparently has, then no one can feel safe, not us for sure, and not even the good cops who are still on the force.

If you get stopped by a policeman because you have a busted taillight, let’s say, you better think twice about reaching into the glove compartment for your proof of insurance. You might get shot. That’s not an exaggeration. And that’s definitely not something any of us should have to worry about in a decent and civilized city.

It’s tough to think such things, but it seems to be that officers are being trained to have a prejudice against the abnormal, the disenfranchised, against all those who are outside the mainstream, who are “human waste” as one cop phrased it.

So what’s to be done? I’d say recall the mayor. Fire the new chief. Turn the department over to federal prosecutors. Fire the people who run the academy. Radically changed the curriculum there with full public disclosure. Raise the education requirements of newly hired officers. Do thorough background checks before they are hired. Insist that police be paragons of the law, not bullies and cowards.  Then constitute a three person police restructuring board from police departments with good records out of state, redesign everything in consort with a representative citizen oversight board, and start over again.

I have to wonder what James Boyd was like as a boy and if he ever had any dreams abut his future or if he understood how he came to be who he was.

Downtown Revitalization

Downtown revitalization. What a noble idea, what a long history of half successes and big defeats.

Just up Central is something called EDO, or East Downtown. It did what downtown couldn’t do – thrive progressively with good restaurants and major works of historic preservation that includes renovating old Albuquerque High as living quarters, restoring the old Public Library, and  transforming an historic hospital into a hotel. There’s even some retail. And EDO is connected along Broadway to good redevelopment on South Broadway.

But much of that success was achieved over the strenuous objections and continuing enmity of the residents of nearby historic neighborhoods who feel dissed and ignored. Ultimately, that could undermine EDO’s building on good works in the years ahead.

Whatever happens to downtown revitalization, the one thing the area cannot survive is the fear factor of its dark nights – the bars and the cops, both of which seem out of control to most of us.

I’ve been a denizen of downtown since l966. Downtown has had some miraculous successes, including the preservation of the Kimo Theater and a number of other historic architectural treasures, the Gold Street condos, the Main Library, what used to be First Plaza Galaria, and the new Cineplex. But downtown lost its soul a while back along with its retail, and most reasons for going there if its streets don’t house your place of work.

When Mayor David Rusk created “Downtown Saturday night” in the late l970s the old soul of the place was still alive. People from all over town arrived in droves to a massive street party, friendly police on horseback, music and food and good times everywhere. No one had a thought of being mugged or perhaps whacked over the head by some testy cop in foul mood, or roughed up by the police because they weren’t Anglo. It wasn’t that kind of city then.

But for the last forty years or so – with that brief but successful interlude in the 1970s -- good folks have been struggling and struggling to give the place new life and with scant success.

What catastrophes! Tearing down the two great historic hotels that bookended downtown – the Alvarado and the Franciscan; gutting much of the legacy of Albuquerque’s passion for architecture during Urban Renewal; allowing that heat-sink, brutal monstrosity of a Civic Plaza to not only be built, but then rebuilt by the same designers; allowing much of the redevelopment to go north and south of Central avenue, especially the courthouses which suck all the life out of Central and all its potential eateries and retail spaces; and worst of all, turning downtown at night into a place where not even savvy denizens want to spend time, with booze flowing and cops setting up road blocks and scaring the wits out of everyone.

It’s ironic that downtown should be Bar Town now. Mayor Harry Kinney during his first term, as I recall, wanted to do two things to give downtown some class – get rid of liquor and get rid of who Harry and the City Council considered “undesirables.” He got rid of liquor by working to close down bars, and let booze flow in hotels and other upper class places. And he got rid of “undesirables” by moving the two big bus terminals – Continental Trail Ways and Grayhound Bus Lines – on to south First Street. The booze solution didn’t work. A bar is a bar by any other name. And local downtown property owners were hit hard by not being able to compete with the hotel chains for those of us who enjoy a drink now and then.

And the bus terminal solution was a civil and human rights insult and a huge inconvenience to everyone who couldn’t afford a car in the 5^th largest state in the Union.

It also stripped downtown of its authenticity as a real place for all kinds of people and tried to turn it into a very low key upper class shopping mall with, as it turns out, no stores to speak of.

The property owners war in Albuquerque still rages on, with the downtowners still losing, the uptowners still winning big with all the new retail development along Louisiana, and many of the West Mesa owners flopping around like fish out of water.

Recent efforts have been heartening – a year-round growers market, a movie palace and good parking, street tree replanting, the Alvarado Urban Farm and turning downtown into an arts and culture district.

Find a way to convince the city that we can do some shopping there, get a trolley to Old Town and the city’s museums and up the hill to UNM, find an array of good eateries and, above all, give us the feeling of real safety as much as from the police as from revelers, and then maybe folks will give the place another look.

The most telling fact, though, about the stop and go nature of downtown revitalization these days is that shoppers aren’t afraid to go to Uptown when it’s dark, and the presence of police and paramilitary snipers wearing backwards ball caps are nowhere to be seen. Until the same is true downtown, the grim nighttime will be in people’s minds and make daytime ease impossible to achieve on a large scale.

Is it possible to get five or six good new restaurants downtown, a couple of new hotels, and a good mix of shops with reasonable parking? Of course it is.  But why doesn’t that happen? Is it the property owners themselves? Why is there still a parking lot on the northwest corner of Sixth and Central where the Franciscan used to be?  It’s been empty for 43 years. Why is there still a huge parking lot on Central Avenue itself from Third to Second on the south side of the street?  Those remain iconic defeats for downtown revitalization.  Why should there be a new Uptown but no new Downtown?  Who owns the land? Who is making the decisions?

Judge Harry D. Robins – 1901 -1976

Municipal Court in Albuquerque in the mid-1960s was a colorful place. Its dominant personality was Judge Harry D. Robins, former Asst. District Attorney and former chair of the Republican Party, when the GOP was still an honorable, if wrongheaded party.

Judge Robins had, how should I say it, issues with the APD and with the Sheriff’s Department when I covered his courtroom in the late 1960s. He was a civil libertarian in the guise of a gruff old party boss. Yes, for Christmas he’d put a bottle of Jim Beam and a big cigar in your drawer at the Pox Box, the nasty little cubby hole for Tribune police beat reporters, though he didn’t bother to find out if you drank whisky and smoked stogies. Yes, he was charming to the Ladies of the Night when they came before him each morning to be tisk tisked by him in his cordial way and asked how their breakfast was and if they’d slept well. Yes, he was a character. And yes, the police didn’t like him.

Rough up a woozy driver or poke an anti-war protester too hard and Harry Robins would give an officer the lecture and dismiss the case. A stickler for solid evidence, even in petty misdemeanors, Judge Robins sided more times than not with the accused, assuming innocence in the face of fuming officers offering hearsay and imprecision.

He was particularly irritable in situations in which police brutality was alleged, or when it became clear in a case before him that the old saying “law and order in the Valley and police protection in the Heights” appeared to be true.

Harry Robins was a believer in the Bill of Rights, especially on the bench when it came to freedom of speech and assembly, and the proper gathering of evidence. Sloppy searches and seizures, the assumption of guilt, and an expectation of deference toward the authorities were an anathema to him in his courtroom.

One case of his I remember vividly. An eccentric man living not far from the University in an otherwise average neighborhood was accused by his neighbors of being a big nuisance. They called the City Health Department who investigated and found that his living conditions were unsanitary and his horticultural practices alarming to the keepers of well-groomed lawns and shrubs.

His house was hidden from view by many trees and hedges, so many that it seemed to the neighborhood like “a jungle.” Some folks accused his big house cats of coming into their kitchens at suppertime and stealing food right off their plates. It was alleged that behind all those trees and shrubs he danced naked in his garden around the grave of his wife. Rumors were turning him into a potential serial killer just because he liked his privacy and didn’t trim his hedges. The Health Department found lots of newspapers in his house, and a good bit of untidiness. He may even have been a hoarder.

I forget the exact charge against him, but the man appeared before Judge Robins with no lawyer and looking, as I recall, fairly bewildered and offended. The judge questioned all concerned. I believe the health department people, when asked, revealed they had found no cats on the premises, nor any tell tale equipment, and had come across no grave. Realizing there was some hysteria on the part of the neighbors, Judge Robins was more charming than ever that morning, calming everyone down with folksy humor as best he could.

But he made it clear to the neighbors that it wasn’t a crime to be a poor tree pruner, or to be person marching to his own drum. Then he asked the “defendant,” with courtesy, if he had any family that might help him trim his grove. The man was sad to say he had no family. The judge thought a bit, and then said to the effect “perhaps you could try a little harder. We’ll take this up again in six months.”

Eventually some neighbors helped the man clean up just enough and the charges were dropped.

Judge Robins took a nasty situation and refused to let it get nastier.  He was careful to explain to the neighbors that being a non-conformist wasn’t against the law.

I’ve got to wonder what might have happened in the same kind of situation in this shoot-first-ask-questions-later day and age of ours.  Would the man who likes wild woods around his house be in danger of being blasted by a “beanbag” or shot dead on his doorstep? I don’t think that’s an unreasonable question to ask in Albuquerque in 2014.

(Image credits: Downtown ABQ by Will Keightley, courtroom drawing by Beinecke Library.)