State Police, Corrections join ALeRT
APD program helps identify and target repeat offenders
Some people arrested over and over and over are beyond redemption and just need to be “separated from society,” Gov. Susana Martinez said Thursday during her and Mayor Richard Berry’s announcement that State Police and probation/ parole agencies will now link into the city police department’s Analysis Led Recidivism Team coordination project.
The ALeRT project, launched in May, is a plan to increase and speed up communication between police agencies making arrests and prosecutors with the goal of “getting criminals off the streets and in jail or prison where they belong,” said Martinez, a former prosecutor.
The project is in response to “unprecedented disruptions” in the criminal justice system that have resulted in hardened criminals being released from jail or prison, Berry said, flanked by law enforcement officials.
These “disruptions” include the county’s effort to reduce its unconstitutionally high jail population, the more recent and high-profile effort by the state judiciary to end its long-time unconstitutional practices of holding people on very high bails, and not attending to poor people kept in jail on nonviolent charges for an inability to post low bonds.
Albuquerque police, the sheriff’s office, the District Attorney’s Office and the FBI originally partnered in the project, and now the list includes New Mexico State Police and the probation and parole agents at the Department of Corrections, who can make arrests around the state.
The ALeRT communications flow through the Albuquerque Police Department’s real time crime center, which is a hub of police and civilian analysts who have access to police and
public databases of criminal information.
Several new analysts were hired by APD earlier this year to flag people who pop up as frequent fliers in the criminal justice system. To do so, they look at, among other flags, people whose fingerprints show up at crime scenes, people who have failed to appear for court hearing or are wanted on probation or parole violations, and people with multiple arrests, especially on escalating charges.
The ALeRT team then makes a weekly list of people who fit these and other criteria and sends it to participating agencies, who can keep a lookout or make special efforts to apprehend people on the list.
Such criminal history details don’t always show up when a defendant appears in court for the first time for a hearing about an appropriate bail amount they can afford or a determination of their danger to the community.
That means, officials say, that a person arrested for a seemingly minor crime might actually be a suspect in numerous other crimes or they may have been arrested for many crimes that were charged and later dismissed, making them possibly more dangerous to the community.
Berry said 22 ALeRT offenders have been arrested since May.