{"id":47109,"date":"2025-05-23T15:47:22","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T22:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/?p=47109"},"modified":"2025-05-23T15:47:24","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T22:47:24","slug":"the-11-year-police-reform-effort-in-albuquerque-should-not-end-with-a-whimper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/the-11-year-police-reform-effort-in-albuquerque-should-not-end-with-a-whimper\/","title":{"rendered":"The 11-Year Police Reform Effort in Albuquerque Should Not End ‘With a Whimper’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I have written many thousands of words about police violence in Albuquerque, the city that has allowed me space to make a home for 23 years \u2014 nearly half my life.

The bulk of those appeared in the Albuquerque Journal<\/em>, where I covered the criminal legal system from 2004 through 2013. My focus narrowed around 2009, when an unignorable picture began to clarify: Police officers in this city shot a lot of people, killing most of them.\u00a0

No one kept national databases on police killings back then, but I had my own list and, based on the rudimentary national comparisons I was able to make, the Albuquerque Police Department appeared to have one of the country\u2019s highest rates of fatal police shootings in 2010.

I kept writing.\u00a0

Rumblings began in 2011 that the U.S. Department of Justice was considering an investigation into whether APD had what\u2019s known in federalese as a \u201cpattern and practice\u201d of violating residents\u2019 constitutional rights through the use of excessive force. Justice Department officials made it official at a news conference on Nov. 27, 2012<\/a>.\u00a0

(Quick aside: I\u2019d link to some of my work from back in those days but, sadly, a previous Journal<\/em> editor migrated the entire, pre-2020 archive to newspapers.com, which requires a subscription fee. Here is a piece I wrote<\/a> while working as an investigative producer for KRQE-TV the year after I left the Journal<\/em> \u2014 I had to fish it out of the Wayback Machine because most of the station\u2019s old stuff has also been memory-holed, but it\u2019ll give you a flavor of what I was up to a decade-plus ago.)\u00a0

DOJ higher-ups announced the investigation\u2019s conclusion at another news conference<\/a>, this one on April 10, 2014. That same day, the feds issued a damning, 46-page findings letter<\/a>. It stated APD officers had not only been systematically violating the Constitution, but department brass\u2019 and City Hall\u2019s \u201clack of internal oversight (had) allowed a culture of aggression to develop.\u201d\u00a0

It would be impossible to overstate the weight of all this. For years, the families of police violence victims and other concerned community members had packed City Council meetings, demanding change. There were sit-ins at the Mayor\u2019s Office. Massive street protests, the size of which had not been seen in Albuquerque for a generation, erupted \u2014 some ending in clouds of tear gas, beaten demonstrators and arrests.\u00a0

Even the local commercial television stations, so often aligned with police perspectives and narratives, were zeroing in on shootings and other instances of excessive force.\u00a0

This was all before the highly publicized police-violence protests in Ferguson, Missouri, before then-Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on camera in a city street, before that long, hot summer of reckoning in 2020.

In Albuquerque, civic outrage over violent police encounters had already simmered and boiled over.\u00a0
City residents seemed to draw a deep, collective breath after the DOJ findings letter dropped and, eventually, led then-Mayor Richard Berry to sign an agreement<\/a> with the feds, promising to fix his deeply broken police department in lieu of being forced to do so through a civil lawsuit in federal court. There were warnings that the Court Approved Settlement Agreement or, CASA, as it\u2019s known colloquially, would be no panacea, no sure-fire salve for a culture so deeply rooted in APD.
But there was also hope.

Eleven years passed, most of them providing evidence that the road to reform was full of potholes, blocked at many intersections by towering blue barriers. The best way to mark the years is by reading the Independent Monitor reports on the Justice Department\u2019s website<\/a>. You\u2019ll see from those documents that since 2022, APD appeared to be more regularly meeting federally mandated benchmarks \u2014 despite persistently high rates of police shootings<\/a> in the city.

The CASA mandated that APD be in full compliance with its requirements for two years in order to dismiss it. The city never reached that threshold. Still, a couple of weeks ago, Mayor Tim Keller\u2019s administration and Civil Rights Division lawyers in President Donald Trump\u2019s newly minted Justice Department filed a motion asking U.S. District Judge James Browning to do just that.
Browning signed the order on May 12.

I was surprised to see so little news coverage of what was, to me, such a massive event. The Keller Administration issued a somewhat celebratory news release<\/a>, and most of the major news organizations around the state got the dismissal into the public record. But as one journalist friend remarked, \u201cIt\u2019s dying with a whimper.\u201d

That didn\u2019t sit right with my team at New Mexico in Focus. So, we decided to dedicate a two-part series exploring a couple of key questions. This week\u2019s show explores how the CASA came about, what it took to get out from under it and, most importantly, whether it worked to change that \u201cculture of aggression\u201d Justice Department investigators identified at APD so long ago. Next week, we will look ahead: What\u2019s next for the department now that the feds have pulled up stakes and left town, and what will it take to ensure the department doesn\u2019t slide back to the dark days of the early 2010s?

Police Chief Harold Medina sat with Nash Jones, our host, for nearly 50 minutes to answer these and other questions. As with the other interviews we conducted, you\u2019ll see that conversation in two parts. City Councilor Nichole Rogers questioned the timing of the CASA\u2019s end and talked with Nash about how the city\u2019s legislative branch must hold APD accountable in the post-DOJ era. And Albuquerque-based civil rights lawyer Mark Fine, whose firm has represented the families of many people slain by APD, offered a hopeful assessment of the \u201cscaffolding\u201d the settlement agreement put in place, then described the enormous task ahead for city leaders to ensure it does not crumble.

It was deeply important \u2014 vital, even \u2014 that we remember what all of this was about: people directly impacted by police violence in this city.\u00a0

On April 12, 2011, APD detectives CJ Brown and Richard Hilger jumped a wall into a back yard in Taylor Ranch. Neither was wearing a police uniform. Within minutes, Brown shot 27-year-old Christopher Torres three times in the back, killing him. Torres had been living with schizophrenia for years.
In 2014, a state judge ruled that the officers themselves created the danger \u2014 and they\u2019d lied about what happened in that back yard \u2014 and ordered the city to pay Christopher\u2019s parents, Steve and Renetta Torres, $6 million to settle a lawsuit. By then, they\u2019d become among the city\u2019s most prominent voices in a swelling movement pushing for reform at APD \u2014 and the circumstances surrounding Christopher\u2019s death connected deeply to nearly every aspect of the rot that had swept through the department\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve known the Torreses for many years through my reporting but had not spoken with them since 2019 or so. I badly wanted viewers to hear their perspective, now that the CASA is gone, and was grateful when they agreed to an interview. This week\u2019s episode begins with a conversation about what they lost that day 14 years ago and what it took to make the federal government step in at APD; next week\u2019s show will end with their message to other families who are living now and will live in the future with what they\u2019ve experienced for nearly a decade and a half.

I hope you\u2019ll listen.

-Jeff Proctor, Executive Producer<\/p>\n\n\n\n