Apology appreciated; APD credibility now on the line

Admitting a mistake is never easy. Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller deserves credit for acknowledging he and interim Police Chief Michael Geier jumped the gun when they said last month APD officers didn’t violate policies or procedures in interactions with a 7-year-old girl the Attorney General’s Office says was being prostituted by close family members.

“It was premature to go out with those kinds of statements,” Keller told Journal reporters and editors last week. “We should have waited.”

Among the criticism APD has faced since the AG charged two of the girl’s relatives is that police decided not to take into evidence the girl’s blood-stained underwear after being called to her school last November. Nor did APD conduct a “safehouse” interview. APD has since launched an internal affairs investigation into how the case was handled; Keller says the results will be made public.

The turnaround came about the same time the Children Youth and Families Department revealed APD had, in fact, accessed a CYFD database that would have alerted officers to the frequent calls regarding the girl and/or her siblings. That’s significant because Keller had previously said if officers had known about the history when they interviewed the teacher and family in November, they might have acted differently.

While someone at APD accessed the CYFD database, it’s unclear who saw the information and what was done with it. The mayor says he wants to put in place a system that documents who accesses the portal.

The mayor and Chief Geier are holding a news conference this afternoon to announce policy changes at APD designed to protect kids from abuse and neglect. The changes should include the fix the mayor mentioned that will allow the department to track who accesses the CYFD portal and which cases they pull up. That’s key to bringing more accountability to these types of investigations.

Keller said a “bunker mentality that goes down to every unit” was partially to blame for the premature response, and he and Geier erred by trying to give a quick answer to reporters and the public about the case.

“What we learned is that you can’t make a few phone calls and say you have the entire picture,” he said. “And we’re not going to do it again. I think we learned a lot through this.”

It’s refreshing to see a mayor and police chief own up to a mistake like this. Now it’s up to APD’s internal affairs unit to conduct an honest and thorough investigation into what went wrong in this case, and it’s up to Keller to follow through on his promise to make the results public.

The credibility of the new mayor and his police department is on the line.