Mayor, APD chief need to get ABQ off this No. 1 list
It may be old news, as Deputy Chief of Police Harold Medina characterizes it, but the fact that the Albuquerque area was rated No. 1 in the country in auto theft for the second year in a row is still appalling.
Just ask the 9,989 people who reported their vehicles stolen last year about the havoc that wreaked with their lives and their ability to get to work, school and even the grocery store. And then there’s having to come up with several hundred dollars for an insurance deductible or thousands of dollars for a replacement vehicle.
For those families already struggling to make ends meet, this is the type of catastrophe that could plunge them into financial ruin. For the rest of us who drive a vehicle, it means higher insurance premiums.
Which is why it’s so critical for local law enforcement agencies to finally get their arms around this pervasive problem and figure out how to tackle it.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau, which put out the rankings, includes Bernalillo, Sandoval, Torrance and Valencia counties for the Albuquerque area.
To Medina’s point, unfortunately no, it isn’t surprising that we’ve ranked No. 1 in the country for the second year in a row. And most of these vehicle thefts occurred during the tenure of Albuquerque’s previous mayor and the previous Albuquerque Police Department command staff. But Mayor Tim Keller and police Chief Mike Geier, who took office Dec. 1, won’t have that excuse next year.
To their credit, they have already moved forward on initiatives they believe will make a difference. In January, for example, they targeted the southeast part of the city with a four-day operation that resulted in 22 felony arrests and 23 recovered vehicles.
Medina said early indications show a reduction of around 17 percent for auto theft in the first six months of 2018. He attributed it to the new administration seeking partnerships across agencies and increasing community policing in an effort to tackle auto thefts.
Whether that will be enough to free the Albuquerque area from the unfortunate designation as the worst area in the nation for auto theft remains to be seen. But everyone who owns a vehicle in the four-county area certainly hopes so.