Meet Albuquerque’s New Public Safety Braintrust

While New Mexico in Focus is a statewide, weekly news show, sometimes a big story in one part of the state demands our full attention. The legislative session in Santa Fe, flooding in Ruidoso, or fires in San Miguel and Mora counties come to mind. This week, we spent the time we felt was necessary on just such a story — new leadership appointments at the Albuquerque Police Department.  

APD is the state’s largest law enforcement agency – and its most troubled. Less than a year ago it finally got out from under 11 years of court-ordered oversight by the U.S. Department of Justice for a pattern of unconstitutional use of excessive force and a leadership structure that enabled it. 

Still today, APD remains among the deadliest police departments in the country. And there are still other failings. 

Despite Mayor Tim Keller’s progressive-sounding rhetoric, Albuquerque police have ratcheted up arrests of homeless people in recent years, swelling the county jail population, according to a ProPublica investigation. And more than a dozen officers from APD and other agencies have pleaded guilty over the last year-plus in a decades-long corruption scandal in which cops conspired with lawyers to take bribes, thereby allowing suspected drunken drivers to walk away from their court cases.  

We touched on those troubling headlines this week, too, but APD’s post-consent decree future seemed the most salient backdrop to this episode’s interviews with newly appointed Police Chief Cecily Barker and Public Safety Executive Director Raul Bujanda. I asked them about the timing of the consent decree ending, how the department’s reforms are holding up and how they plan to enforce accountability and prevent erosion of the DOJ-led changes.    

As an internal hire, Barker has been at APD for more than 20 years — since well before the Justice Department dropped the hammer. So, while we looked ahead plenty, I also asked her about what she saw in those before times, and what she did about it. Her brother and fellow APD officer, Jeff Bludworth, fatally shot Vincent Wood, a Black man with a knife, in 2013. I asked about how that experience affected Barker’s view of police shootings, and how that perspective will show up in her approach to leading the department.  

As an outside hire, Bujanda doesn’t have the historical perspective Barker does — at least not from within APD. But he does have a resume that’ll undoubtedly color his priorities as he steps into the new role of public safety boss. He retired last year as the special agent in charge of Albuquerque’s FBI office, where he investigated APD officers in the DWI corruption scheme. I asked what non-public information he has, if any, about cops who were investigated but not charged – officers he’ll now oversee. Before the FBI, Bujanda worked for Immigration Naturalization Services (the predecessor to ICE) after spending much of his teen years in Ciudad Juárez. He told me that experience changed his perspective on immigration enforcement, cementing values he’ll bring to leading the public safety arm of an immigrant-friendly city.  

I spoke with Barker and Bujanda about plenty more, too (the interviews are both two-parters that make up the bulk of this week’s show.) But hopefully this glimpse gives you a sense of why we dedicated this program to the topic, and how we went about covering it.  

I hope you’ll tune in tonight to learn more about what to expect from an Albuquerque Police Department under new leadership.  

– Nash Jones, Host