Shelved criminal justice audit might have saved lives
Eighty-two — the number of families affected by Albuquerque’s murderous 2019 crime wave, the number of senseless deaths, and the number of reasons why state Auditor Brian Colón should have completed the review of the criminal justice system begun under my administration as state auditor. Instead, Colón sat on five of seven completed special audits for 11 months and allowed two of the designated entities — the Law Offices of the Public Defender and the city of Albuquerque — to violate state law and ignore their statutorily required audit, calling my designation “superfluous.”
The Journal’s Jan. 6 editorial criticized me for ordering the audits in 2018 because the combined cost was around $90,000 and “similar reviews were under way.” In fact, the special audits I ordered were quite different from other “reviews,” particularly the
Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) review. The LFC predictably focused on policy and statistics and proceeded from a policy premise that you can program your way out of a crime crisis. Whereas the audits objectively analyzed the justice system as it functions today without a policy bias.
These audits were performed by independent public accountants who have been trained to review systems, perform testing, and are required to maintain independence — a trait a policy body such as the LFC, which is dominated by the majority party, decidedly lacks. The audits were designed to inform policy, not make it.
The critical piece of the project was to tie the work of the seven audits together in order to break down the systemic silos and identify potential improvements. Colón was never interested in completing a project begun by my administration, regardless of its value, so he never did the work, nor did he release the five completed audits for 11 months. Yet the Journal insisted on coddling Colón by complaining about a set of $18,000 audits that, if completed, may have saved lives and completely ignored his lack of timeliness. And to put the cost in perspective, Bernalillo County alone spends over $170,000 a year on internal and external audits, not to mention millions on law enforcement and behavioral health.
If Colón had decided to finish what we started, he might have found — among many things — that the court’s case management system tracks cases, not offenders. This makes it almost impossible for a judge to spot offenders who are becoming increasingly dangerous and should be detained. It’s a weakness made worse by the fact that the District Attorney’s Office, the Metropolitan Detention Center and the courts don’t consistently track metrics like the number of felony arrests, number of detention requests, number of indictments, etc. This would be like a doctor who ignored your medical history and didn’t write down how or what he/she treated you for. He/she would be unable to spot chronic illnesses and have no idea whether you were improving or getting worse.
In 2019, the city of Albuquerque shattered its previous homicide record. Our criminal justice system, due to systemic problems, is failing in its primary mission to keep all of us safe. I’m not saying that either the Journal or the auditor are responsible for Albuquerque’s crime crisis. I am saying that every piece of information and every independent review of our broken system is valuable. And if that information and this project had led to even one life being saved in 2019, it would have been worth every penny. Unfortunately, we will never know.