APD’s Use of Force Report nearly a year behind

Institutional resistance, lack of reliable data collection blamed for delay

When the Albuquerque Police Department released its last Use of Force Report — encompassing both 2016 and 2017 — officials said they had worked to review and correct the data from the previous administration, calling collection methods

“poor at best.”

At the time, in March 2019, APD said it expected to complete the 2018 Use of Force report by the end of the year.

That report still has not been released, a fact the independent monitor overseeing the police reform effort pointed out in his most recent assessment. APD is required to release annual reports on use of force under the Court Approved Settlement Agreement the city entered with the Department of Justice after an investigation found that officers had a pattern of using excessive force against citizens.

“The fact that nearly a year later the 2018 report is not finalized signals to the monitoring team that APD is still struggling to build reliable systems to capture accurate data,” monitor James Ginger wrote in his 11th Independent Monitor’s Report, published in early May.

Kate Jacobs, a data analyst hired by APD’s Internal Affairs Force Division in June of last year, said the delays arose when she began looking at the data and technical

challenges within the existing databases and decided to reanalyze the data that has already been released in last year’s report.

“It’s not a matter of being incorrect or wrong, but it’s moving toward a more refined and thorough way of measuring and reporting,” she said.

Her Use of Force Report, which she said has been completed but is pending final review by APD leadership, will include data from 2016 through 2019.

Jacobs said she could not discuss the specific findings until her report is released.

However, she said some aspects of use-of-force reporting had been inconsistent over the years. For instance, she said, if an officer uses an empty-hand technique to “guide someone to the ground” three times in the same encounter, she recommends that should be counted as three uses of force. In the past, she said, repeated uses of force by the same officer against the same individual had been counted as only one.

Jacobs said her staff also went through hundreds of reports in which an officer had marked “other” as the use of force and tried to characterize the actions as specifically as possible.

“I felt like we could be more specific, more detailed and really made an effort to be as transparent and open as we could,” Jacobs said.

Representatives of APD Forward, a coalition of nonprofit organizations and community groups dedicated to police reform, said they were briefed on the delays and hope to see the data soon.

“I equate it to what athletes do after the game — they go watch the tape and it’s a way to get better,” said Barron Jones, a senior policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico. “I think the reports are super important, but also the monitor has brought up that their lack of ability to produce these reports in timely fashion points to the problems the department has with collecting data and aggregating data.”

Compromised data

The Court Approved Settlement Agreement overseeing the APD reform effort mandates that the department release a report at least once a year tracking several factors, including the number of calls for service and the number of officer-initiated actions, the number of arrests, the number of aggregated uses of force and force by level and the number of people injured during arrest.

The department has created a policy to this effect but has not been in compliance with training or carrying it out.

Meanwhile, the independent monitor overseeing the reform effort has also found previous uses or shows of force that officers failed to report, which he said affects the veracity of the data.

“While we are encouraged by the thoroughness of the IAFD’s (Internal Affairs Force Division) work, we reiterate to APD that we are still concerned with the legitimacy of statistics that would be contained in reports like the 2018 Use of Force Annual Report,” Ginger wrote in his most recent assessment. “In prior conversations we made clear the need to qualify information contained in their Use of Force Annual Reports, since the accuracy of past reporting was significantly compromised for a host of reasons.”

A common theme in the monitor’s reports over the years are midlevel supervisors within APD who he said continue to resist reforms in the settlement agreement. Reporting of force is also plagued by this problem.

“We believe that even with good policy and strong training programs APD’s data will be compromised until meaningful corrective actions are taken in the field,” Ginger wrote. “To date, we have not observed a meaningful commitment to deal with obstinate supervisors and mid-level command officers on this issue.”

Ginger also said he learned in December that 28 internal affairs investigations opened into policy violations by supervisors had been moving toward disciplinary action but missed deadlines for officers to be disciplined. Although the Internal Affairs commander was removed from his position, the monitor sharply criticized APD command personnel for not providing his team with the timeline of the cases or opening up an internal affairs investigation into how the deadlines were allowed to pass.

“No one, no matter his or her rank, should be able to be part of such deliberate, or even presumably incompetent, laissez-faire approaches to deliberate contradiction of the CASA without being subject to investigation and response,” the monitor wrote.

An APD spokesman did not respond to questions about the incident, including who the commander is, where he was transferred to or if an internal affairs investigation was ever opened.

Use of force

The 2016 and 2017 reports released in March of last year found, among other things, that fewer than 2% of arrests involved use of force but that force was used regularly against unarmed people. In 2017, almost 75% of people involved in use-of-force cases were unarmed. In 2016, 48.5% were classified as “unarmed” but about 30% were marked as “unknown.”

The 2015 report, compiled by the previous administration, followed a different format and didn’t track shows of force, in which an officer displays a weapon but does not use force.

Jones, with the ACLU, said that even with the years of delays, this type of data is useful in seeing how the department is doing with reforms.

“Without the data that those reports provide we or the public can’t assess whether the department is moving in the direction that the CASA designed,” Jones said.