Councilor should combat crime

CITY COUNCILOR Pat Davis, who coincidentally is running for a New Mexico congressional district seat in 2018, wants to call for congressional hearings regarding recent ATF operations in Albuquerque. These operations consisted of 102 arrests and 74 convictions so far. Convictions of real criminals. I ask, how can this be bad?

Councilor Davis says he is concerned about the poor, downtrodden criminals located in the Southwest section — not his section — of our city, specifically the homeless, poor and minorities. It obviously doesn’t occur to him that the SW section of the city has a huge criminal population, with a lot of crime, and police have to physically go there to effect an arrest.

Albuquerque police can’t keep up with the burgeoning crime rate, and I, for one, welcome the federal government finally stepping in, arresting and convicting these free-range repeat offenders. DEA, ATF and the FBI are actually doing what the Albuquerque police cannot or will not do. When the Albuquerque Police Department does arrest repeat offenders, milquetoast judges release these criminals to offend again and again. There is seemingly no end to this.

The crime is so bad we have had to hire our own police force in Four Hills because we get only the barest response out of APD (officers) when they’re needed. Their hands are tied with this Department of Justice agreement, leaving them basically unable to enforce the law, and in my view, not much inspiration to do so. I, for one, am sick of the mollycoddling of the repeat offenders and the fake “loved-ones” suing the city and actually getting away with it, over and over, at taxpayer expense.

In sum, Councilor Davis should stick to fixing his own District 6 nightmare and stop wasting everyone’s time with supposed concerns about the Southwest. Conversely, he should actually work on solving crime in District 6 — the “International” Zone — instead of complaining about federal law enforcement that actually gets something done here for a change.