BCSO in crisis?
Nine shootings in four months raise alarm, remind some of APD’s past missteps
Human rights activist Selinda Guerrero is part of a group that started a Facebook page in 2010 called “APD in Crisis” in response to a spike in shootings involving Albuquerque police officers.
Last week, the group changed the name to “APD & BCSO in crisis.”
Advocates, civil rights organizations and attorneys are taking note of the recent spike in shootings by Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies. They say Sheriff Manuel Gonzales should examine the increase and whether the department needs more training, policies or checks for reviewing and addressing use-of-force cases. BCSO deputies have been involved in nine shootings in the past 4½ months: Five people have been killed, three wounded — one of whom is still in the hospital — and two others were not hit. That total is more than the number of times deputies opened fire in all of 2015 and 2016 combined.
“We’re seeing it again with BCSO and we’re very concerned about this trend,” Guerrero said. “Our goal with our page and our movement is to try to identify these issues and see if we can get ahead of the violence before it comes to a point where we’re No.1 in the country again.”
Guerrero said her group held a rally in August to address the shootings by BCSO and is in the midst of planning further action.
Civil rights organizations and attorneys echo her concerns.
“It reminds me of the pattern we saw in the 2010 to 2013 range with the Albuquerque Police Department, where the officer-involved shootings were mounting at a regular pace,”
said Peter Simonson, the executive director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico. “Before we knew it, we were in a full-blown crisis, where the department was shooting and killing someone every month.”
While deputies have fired their weapons nine times since July, in the same time period Albuquerque police have shot at four people, killing one and injuring three.
APD officers have shot at a total of 11 people this year; the department is about three times bigger and patrols a much more populated area than BCSO.
Sheriff Gonzales declined interviews for this article, but he has previously said the increase in shootings is a result of more “violent people who have very extensive records” on the streets. At news conferences, he has said that he is not going to second-guess deputies for opening fire.
“Given the recent ongoing investigations, pending press conference on the latest deputy involved shooting and
upcoming holiday this week, the sheriff is not prepared for an interview,” spokeswoman Felicia Maggard wrote in an email Wednesday.
Reform for ABQ
Many other activists and civil rights organizations growing concerned about the deputy-involved shootings over recent months were involved in the push for APD reform.
Albuquerque police are in the midst of a yearslong reform effort that was outlined in a settlement agreement between the city and the U.S. Department of Justice.
The agreement was reached after the DOJ found Albuquerque police had a pattern of excessive force, which included police shootings. For the last three years, the police have been working to meet the terms of that agreement.
The city now has a stronger civilian oversight system that reviews police shootings and use-of-force cases, whereas the county has no civilian oversight.
BCSO’s standard operating procedures dictate that “deputies shall use only that force which is reasonably necessary to protect the sanctity of human life, preserve and protect individual liberties, and to effect lawful objectives. All deputies will act in good faith in the exercise of force. The deputies’ options can range from a continuum of verbal persuasion to deadly force. In vesting deputy sheriffs with the lawful authority to use force to protect the public welfare, a careful balancing of all human interests is required.”
Shannon Kennedy, a civil rights attorney who has brought suits against APD, said this policy is unconstitutional based on a Supreme Court ruling that requires authorities to determine whether force is necessary based on an objective set of factors, rather than a deputy’s perceptions. She said BCSO doesn’t require deputies to consider the severity of the crime or the immediate threat a suspect poses.
No change here
Many of the communities in unincorporated Bernalillo County are predominately Latino, according to Ralph Arellanes, the executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, who described the area as “traditional.” He said many families have lived in those areas for generations, so he questioned how the sheriff could say the area has grown more violent recently.
“There’s no way the population the sheriff is patrolling is more dangerous than what APD is patrolling,” he said.“Why is there such a disparity in shootings and killings?”
The Sheriff’s Office mainly patrols unincorporated areas of Bernalillo County, including the South Valley, Pajarito Mesa and parts of the East Mountains. Only about 117,000 of the entire county’s 677,000 estimated people live in those areas, according to a 2016 estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The county law enforcement agency is much smaller than the city’s police force. BCSO has a little more than 300 deputies, while the Albuquerque Police Department is authorized for 1,000 officers. APD, however, has only about 830 now and has been understaffed for several years.
Albuquerque has seen skyrocketing numbers of violent crimes and property crimes in recent years, while Bernalillo County has reported slight increases, according to data released by the FBI.
APD homicide detectives have investigated 67 murders so far in 2017, whereas BCSO detectives have investigated five homicides by civilians in addition to the nine shootings involving deputies.
The rate of violent crime in Albuquerque was 1.7 times the rate of violent crime reported in the county outside the city last year, and property crime rates were almost three times higher.
Call for meeting
Harold Bailey, the president of the NAACP in Albuquerque, said the association has been paying attention to the uptick in shootings by deputies, though he doesn’t want to jump to conclusions as to why.
But he said it’s time for community groups to meet with Gonzales to discuss it.
“I think it would be a
good move on the sheriff to call such a meeting,” Bailey said.
Simonson said the ACLU’s main concern is that Gonzales continues to refuse to consider equipping deputies with body-worn cameras. He said that indicates that the sheriff is resisting accountability for his deputies in use-of-force cases.
Simonson said although cameras aren’t a “magic bullet,” they can be effective tools for training and correcting law enforcement.
“That strikes me as an indication that the department doesn’t have very good systems of accountability and that right now there might not be an effective check on the way the department uses force,” he said.
Gonzales has previously said that instead of seeking funding to buy on-body cameras, he wants to hire more deputies. A spokeswoman said the department has 124 deputies assigned to field services.
Many of the shootings that have occurred so far this year are still under internal investigation and are being studied by a multijurisdictional team of local law enforcement agencies. Once those investigations are complete, they will be handed over to the District Attorney’s Office for review.
Officers ‘handcuffed’
Not everyone thinks it would be a good idea for BCSO to try to incorporate some of the Albuquerque police reforms or practices into the BCSO.
“I think it should be a concern for the entire community,” County Commissioner Wayne Johnson said of the increase in shootings. “But I would be really reluctant to start to blame anyone other than the criminals.”
Johnson recently campaigned unsuccessfully for mayor of Albuquerque on a platform that he would renegotiate the city of Albuquerque’s settlement agreement with the DOJ.
He said those reforms have caused police officers to second-guess themselves, which could have contributed to escalating crime rates, and that hesitation by Albuquerque officers may have caused crime to increase in the county, which contributed to the uptick in shootings.
“I’m not a big fan of the DOJ consent decree. I think it’s handcuffed a lot of our officers,” he said. “I personally believe it’s made us all less safe.”
County Commissioner Maggie Hart Stebbins said she has reached out to the sheriff to try to get an explanation for the recent spike in shootings. But she pointed out that the sheriff, unlike the chief of Albuquerque police, is an elected official.
She said she currently has no plans to try to influence the sheriff’s policy.
“When you see a spike in deputyinvolved shootings, we have to pay attention to that and find out why,” she said. “We need to understand the circumstances that led to (the shootings), and if there are any policy changes that would make a difference.”