New Mexico Mercury

Unconstitutional Shootings

By now most of us know the gist of what the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said about the Albuquerque Police Department (APD).  Despite all the decent and respectful cops on the force, the APD has become an institution of bullies. 

It operates with an us/them gang mentality. It’s a department infected by rage and ego inflation.  Its upper management, both elected and appointed, has not only grossly mismanaged the system of accountability within the department, it has openly and shamelessly condoned the horrors it produced.

All the good cops can’t change the fact that when it comes to the use of force, both lethal and non-lethal, the APD has a devastating tendency to act unconstitutionally. When it comes to killing citizens, the DOJ “concluded that a majority of these shootings were unconstitutional [emphasis mine].”  

This amounts to rubbing salt in the wounds of the majority of the 23 families that lost a member to unlawful lethal violence by the police. In the civilian world we call that murder. Most of those families will never recover from their loss. It will go down the generations as a bewildering, depressing, and heartbreaking injustice.

And nothing the DOJ, or Mayor Berry, or the city council does or says will bring any of those family members back.

And it’s not just murders committed by police. The DOJ gave one chilling example after another of the APD’s frequent “misuse” of “electronic control weapons,” or Tasers, to use their brand name. In one, “officers fired Tasers numerous times at a man who had poured gasoline on himself. The Taser discharges set the man on fire requiring another officer to extinguish the flames. This endangered all present.” The APD “frequently” misused Tasers “on people who are passively resisting, observably non-threatening but unable to comply with orders due to their mental state or posed only a minimal threat to the officers.”

What has happened to us here? The DOJ report gives some unforgettable insights.

“APD policy does not require that supervisors conduct a thorough, rigorous and objective review of officers’ use of force, including ensuring that officers provide a complete and accurate account of the facts surrounding their use of force. Instead, supervisors are required to review and sign a two-page form (titled “Use of Force Report Form) this is designed to capture descriptive data about an incident rather than providing for a qualitative review of an officer’s use of force.”

When it comes to officer training the DOJ’s language is staggeringly clear:

“The most significant deficiency we observed in the department’s training programs – both at the academy, where new recruits are trained, and in the ongoing training that officers receive regularly – is the over-emphasis on using force, specially weapons, to resolve stressful encounters, and insufficient emphasis on de-escalation techniques. Much of the training leads officers to believe that violent outcomes are normal and desirable [emphasis mine].”

The DOJ report continues saying, “We also found that the department should provide substantially more training on constitutional law. It appears that officers receive only a few hours of training on constitutional standards at the police academy, and very little (if any) time is put into these topics during maintenance-of-effort training [emphasis mine] . We also note with concern that the legal training materials provided to officers contain a number of cartoons that are likely intended to break up the monotony of the material, but that nevertheless are unprofessional and, in some cases, offensive. These cartoons send the wrong message to officers about the importance of civilians’ legal rights.”

The DOJ report goes on to say that “as mentioned above, APD’s training is focused so heavily on weaponry and force scenarios that officers do not get essential tools to engage in effective de-escalation methods. The training is an element of the culture of aggression [emphasis mine]….Officers see guns as status symbols. APD personnel we interviewed indicated that this fondness for powerful weaponry illustrates the aggressive culture [emphasis mine].”

The cops I’ve admired over the years, as a reporter and observer, look upon their jobs as a calling, and a rewarding one, not as a curse and a torment justifying indiscriminate aggression. As frontline representatives of the Constitution, with the power of life and death, good police officers hold themselves to a higher standard. And I have known many officers like that.

It must be said that it’s not a matter of a few bad apples at APD these days. There’s a whole barrel full of them. And their bosses, including the mayor and city council, are as much to blame for this failure as any CEO would be. But, of course, this is what you can get when you “run government like a business,” no accountability, internal loyalty and a scoff-law mentality, and massive rewards for failed leaders. In our case it was a land-slide re-election. In the case of some banking swindlers, it’s a $2 million raise in pay.

Yes, police work can be tough, nasty and dangerous. But cops are not conscripted.

They apply for the job and if they are hired, they are trained by their employers to serve their clients.  There is nothing involuntary in this process. This is all a matter of choice. People become police officers out of free will.   

Police are employees of the city which is run by people elected by the citizens, and paid for by the citizens. So the police are employees of the public.  And the public does not hire officers to abuse them.

In running the APD, the buck stops with the mayor and the city council. The DOJ report makes it clear that these office holders have been at best incompetent and inept, at worst malfeasant and, in a world where reality matters, perhaps even criminally negligent employers.

It’s all about top down leadership. The values at the top trickle down to the employees. And most of them do what they can get away with because that’s become the business ethic.

The city hires the good cops and the bad cops. Apparently they can’t really tell the difference, and then when they see bad behavior they cover it up, as much to hide their own foolishness as the misbehavior itself. That’s another take on running government like a business, and a bad business at that.

People who run successful small companies usually follow the old axiom of “hiring slowly and firing quickly.” The City and its leadership did neither.

When it comes to the misuse of power in a police department the rule should be zero tolerance. Hire slowly to avoid bad apples and when they appear, chuck them. They must know when they are hired that they will be held accountable for their actions and no brutality and bullying will be condoned or overlooked.

The city has let it be known these days that it will hire virtually anyone to be a cop. You could apply and be hired if you have anger control issues, if you’re a racist or a sadist, if you have PTSD from combat, if you’re a sociopath, or if you are a scoff law. It really doesn’t matter. They couldn’t, or didn’t want to, assess the good cops from the bad. It really didn’t matter, anyway, because cops could get away with their mistakes, even when they were heinous and murderous.

You really don’t want to hire someone for a job with the police department unless they’re calm under pressure, unless they believe in public service as something akin to a sacred duty, unless they are able to take considerable abuse from time to time from people who are not at their best, and weight that abuse against the gratitude of the public when they help them through the accidents that have befallen them, or protected them from those who would do them harm. You don’t want to apply to be a police officer if you don’t like people, if you have problems with empathy and compassion, or if you consider yourself superior to the rest of us.

As the DOJ said, “A well-functioning police department has the trust of the residents it protects, functions as part of the community rather than insulated from it and cultivates legitimacy when the public views it as engaging with them fairly and respecting the rule of law. We started this investigation in November 2012 amid serious public concerns about APD’s ability and willingness to fulfill these precepts.”

The DOJ left no room for fudging here. “The use of excessive force by APD officers is not isolated or sporadic. The pattern or practice of excessive force stems from systemic deficiencies in oversight, training, and policy.  Chief among these deficiencies is the department’s failure to implement an objective and rigorous internal accountability system.”

And here’s where top down leadership is to blame. “We found only a few instances in the incidents we reviewed where supervisors scrutinized officers’ use of force and sought additional investigation. In nearly all cases,[emphasis mine] supervisors endorsed officers’ version of events, even when officers’ accounts were incomplete, were inconsistent with other evidence, or were base on canned or repetitive language. The department does not use other internal review systems, such as the internal affairs early intervention system, effectively….As a result of the department’s inadequate accountability systems, the department oftenˆ[emphasis mine] endorses questionable and sometimes unlawful conduct by officers.”

That’s what it’s felt like around here for some time now, that the department “endorses” illegal behavior of its officers, that it is a kind of mafia with its own hit men that no one holds accountable.

The DOJ accusations of the APD’s “unconstitutional use of deadly force,” included the following.

“Albuquerque police officers shot and killed civilians who did not pose an imminent threat or serious bodily harm or death to the officers or others.”

“Albuquerque police officers used deadly force on individuals in crisis who posed no threat to anyone but themselves.”

“Albuquerque police officers’ own recklessness sometimes led to their use of deadly force.”

“Albuquerque police officers used force against individuals who were passively resisting and posed a minimal threat.”

In other words, leadership, from the top down, let bad cops do what they wanted to do, irrespective of the Constitution or human decency. And these bad cops were supported by bad supervisors, and the rotten apples over them.

The good cops never had a chance to help create a police culture of positive, respectful, service-oriented law enforcement because the top down leadership either didn’t want it or care about it.

How is Albuquerque going to comply with a consent agreement with the DOJ and avoid a massive civil suit with this same leadership in place? I don’t see how it can.

Recall the mayor and elect a new one who will fire the police chief, demote or retire the current leadership structure, start prosecuting bullies and sadists who have betrayed their public trust, and start running the city like a responsive, democratically elected government, not like a corporation with its own hired thugs.

Saying Goodbye, and Flipping the Bird, to New Mexico

It’s been going on for decades. Prominent people who can’t make it in our state choose to leave for greener pastures. When they do, some of them flip us off, or, as one friend likes to say, leave us a little turd on the rug.

They say, in effect, I’m leaving because this is a hopeless place, near the bottom of the barrel in every statistical realm. It’s dangerous. It’s too hard to make a living. It’s a terrible place to raise children. It’s so bad, they say, that New Mexico has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. And so on and so forth.

All of that might be true -- from one perspective.

But from another, it’s like they say of New York. If you can make it in New Mexico, you can make it anywhere. That conveys both the challenges here and the kind of excellence it requires to overcome them, as a person.

Sure, use negative national rankings to stimulate reform measures and to propel government into action, but don’t use them to condemn the whole state, its cultures, or its people and certainly don’t use them as an excuse to overlook the excellence, innovative spirit, creativity and beauty that all places have, and that New Mexico has in stunning abundance.

In her deeply moving and mind-opening new book Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West, (to be reviewed this month in the Mercury) Lucy R. Lippard quotes Eudora Welty as saying “One place understood helps us understand all other places better.”

Despite our problems I am sure most New Mexicans, by a large majority, would say as Lucy Lippard has said, that New Mexico is “one of the loves of my life.”

It’s a sentiment that would echo throughout the villages and towns of Northern New Mexico, throughout the world of the Pueblos, Navajos, and Apaches, throughout the state’s ranchlands and farms, and in the cities too among the communities of poets and painters and musicians, curators and scholars, and honorable people who have devoted their lives to public service. Those who understand New Mexico understand the rest of the world better somehow than if they didn’t love it here.

This morning, as I write in Albuquerque’s North Valley, Tingley flakes swirling around, Mulberry pollen puffing out into the dawn light causing explosions of sneezing, roadrunners stalking the ditches looking for lizards or potential mates, my love of this place comes from an understanding that New Mexico gives to anyone who wants it: Even in very poor places when it comes to money and privilege, the richest kinds of civilization can be built and sustained through the genius of families, of communities,  and of devoted, cordial and creative people in all walks of life. 

One can see that civilization everywhere in New Mexico and everywhere in the rest of the world when people care about each other, care about their land, their history, their culture, and search their inner depths for truth and beauty and the meaning that that comes from belonging to a place and a people that you love.

If it’s a hard place to make a living, you do your best. You follow the advice that New Mexico’s great writer Denise Chavez gave in her announcement of this year’s Border Book Festival in Las Cruces, when she quoted Samuel Beckett as saying “Ever tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.”  That spirit of hopeful courage is true for every hard place on the planet.

By all means let us use our dreaded national rankings to stir us to indignation and righteous action to push us to end such crippling limitations imposed on so many of our fellow New Mexicans. But we must never equate money with overall reality or worth, just as we must never fall into the trap of equating money with freedom of speech.

No one wants to be poor, and in this world of insane wealth and luxury no one should be.

But money isn’t the reason that so many love New Mexico and what it means to us.  It’s called home. And when you are home you tend to give it everything you can. That’s why it’s loved, no matter where it is.  And if it is here in this magnificent, spiritually wise and soul-expanding place, home can be a greatness unto itself.

Carlos Salazar – 1925 - 1998

The opening game at Isotope Park this Friday was a gentle, happy night, with more than 11,000 fans on hand, a mellow mood, and a display of comfortable forbearance when the left and center field lights went out for close to half an hour.  Who could be vexed on a night like that with temperatures in the mid 70s, the mountains glowing to the east, and a field of dreams before you?

Being there, I couldn’t help but think of my old friend Carlos Salazar, Albuquerque Tribune Hall of Fame sports writer and editor until he retired in l996. The press box at Isotope Park is named after him.

For many reporters, the life of a sports writer seems idyllic. And I’m sure I came to such a feeling by watching Carlos move with seemingly carefree ease among his various sporting venues, from boxing to baseball, and everything Lobo you can think of.  Carlos graduated from Albuquerque High in l943, did a stint in the Navy, battled his diabetes, and eventually became the dean of sports writers in the mountain west.

He evolved a prose style that was as vigorous and smooth as the Rio Grande (when it’s flowing). We all marveled that he never reverted to formula leads, as far as we could tell, even after having written about a sport many hundreds of times over the years.  Carlos proved the axioms that talent flows like gold filling all molds and that everything is easy if you see it that way. He was a master and it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d come from L.A. High or Albuquerque High. Major League Baseball gave him a lifetime pass at all its games, he was so good at what he did.

Just like the Isotopes opening night, Carlos was always mellow, always quick with a smile, almost shy, but more reserved than withdrawn. There was nothing hard-bitten about him. He was ever the gentleman and always a scholar of whatever sport he was covering. His special fascination was with boxing, with local greats Danny Romero, Johnny Tapia, and Bobby Foster, and with visitors like Archie Moore.

In his later years, Carlos would greet Rini and me at Furr’s Cafeteria in the North Valley when he was picking something up for his house-bound mother and getting a bite himself. It always made me feel good just to see him and exchange even momentary pleasantries.

At the ball game last Friday, I remembered yearning long ago for the life of a sports writer – a predictable schedule, a work pace that was determined by an absorbing contest that no one could rush, and the chance to witness dreams of glory while earning a living doing it.

That illusion was shattered one afternoon years ago when I saw Carlos at the end of a long day of college and minor league baseball, moving on to a high school game and then later to a smoke filled fight arena. When I asked him how he did it all, he pushed up his glasses, smiled his weary smile, and said “oh you know…..” and then moved on.

Carlos Salazar loved what he did and spent his life doing it well. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that could be said of all of us?

(Image credits: APD neon sign: Mike Peters ; Middle Finger: Arbri Shameti; New Mexico horizon: Woody Hibbard ; Isotopes baseball: Jeff Kramer)