APD on Its Own

Public attention has waned, as it so often does, during the last few years of federal oversight at the Albuquerque Police Department. A post-COVID spike in crime, presidential politics, a massive police corruption scandal — it’s easy enough to see how folks lost touch with the meticulous, numbers-heavy happenings inside a federal courtroom meant to make city officials and the cops they employ follow the Constitution.
 
I wrote about the importance of this 11-year police reform project for the May 23 edition of the New Mexico in Focus newsletter. And we spent last week’s episode exploring what led the feds to step in at the state’s largest law enforcement agency — and whether the long road led to real change. 

This week, we have the same group of guests. But we asked them a different set of questions, built primarily around this: What happens next for APD, now that the Department of Justice is no longer mandating fixes? 

Police Chief Harold Medina struck a reassuring tone, telling our host, Nash Jones: “We’re not going back to where we were… We’ve built a strong department that has accountability, that believes in constitutional policing, and that is lowering crime.” 

Albuquerque City Councilor Nichole Rogers laid out some ideas for how to continue improving APD, and several times she acknowledged that the city’s legislative branch must now play a larger role in assuring accountability.  

Albuquerque-based civil rights lawyer Mark Fine also returns to talk about some of the under-discussed benefits of the reform effort — with transparency at APD topping that list. Fine also questioned why Mayor Tim Keller’s administration has not yet laid out a detailed plan for how to ensure the changes stick. 

And we end this week’s episode where we began Part 1: with Steve and Renetta Torres, who lost their son, Christopher, in 2011 when two plainclothes APD detectives jumped a wall into the family’s back yard and shot him three times in the back. “There’s strength in numbers,” Renetta Torres told me about the couple’s decade-and-a-half fight for change. 

We hope spending two episodes on this massive change for City Hall, its police force and Albuquerque residents has proven valuable for you. And we want you to know that we will continue watching and reporting as APD moves forward on its own. 

-Jeff Proctor, Executive Producer