We shouldn’t trade constitutional rights for effective law enforcement

Ask any person off the street, and they’ll likely tell you the “revolving door” is to blame for the crime problem in New Mexico. At face, it’s not a bad idea – if the justice system is failing to hold dangerous people, they have more opportunity to commit more offenses. But the logic of the revolving door is plain, simple and wrong.

According to research from UNM, less than 5% of defendants on pretrial release commit new violent crimes. Moreover, New Mexico has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country in our jails and prisons. Nonetheless, there’s a growing chorus of politicians blaming pretrial release for our crime problem.

How does pretrial release work? The state Supreme Court has held that defendants cannot be held in jail before trial unless they are shown to be dangerous and that no conditions of pretrial release will guarantee the safety of the community.

Prosecutors request a hearing before a district judge, and rules of evidence are suspended so they can introduce whatever they need to demonstrate those two factors.

Otherwise, conditions of release are set – they can include bond, GPS monitoring, recognizance of another person, curfew, and more.

But prosecutors seem to be failing. In a 2022 Supreme Court case reaffirming the test for pretrial detention, the court noted that prosecutors made only “passing reference” to the release conditions and community safety.

Worse, data from the Administrative Office of the Courts shows that prosecutors request pretrial detention for defendants most dangerous and most likely to reoffend less than 20% of the time.

Despite all of this, a cadre of public officials support legislation creating a “rebuttable presumption,” so that defendants have to prove they’re not dangerous.

Anyone being honest will admit it’s a presumption of guilt, and patently unconstitutional.

Supporters include: District Attorney Sam Bregman, appointed because he’s the former chair of the Democratic Party of New Mexico and now running for the seat he promised not to; Attorney General Raúl Torrez, the former DA who left his office 40 prosecutors short and rising crime in ABQ; Albuquerque Police Department Chief Harold Medina, who has failed to deal with staffing shortages or plummeting clearance rates.

Of note, all of them failed to take any action to stop an organized crime ring in the APD that took bribes for letting off drunk drivers.

The “revolving door” concept and its enablers promote a big lie: that our constitutional rights are an impediment to competent and effective law enforcement. This lie keeps leaders insulated from public accountability and, crucially, keeps us less safe.

We deserve prosecutors who take both due process and public safety seriously enough to know what they’re doing and request detention for truly dangerous defendants.

We deserve well-run police departments that arrest and charge suspects quickly, a stronger deterrent than long-prison sentences.

And we deserve the public service of facts and rational conversation from our leaders in the media and public office – not the promotion of endless fear and anxiety for commercial gain or political credit-claiming.

So please, dear reader, be informed and rational when thinking about crime and punishment in our community. We cannot afford to give up our freedom so easily in exchange for security, or we will surely lose both.