BernCo sheriff in a glass house throwing stones
Gonzales needs to skip the photo ops on APD’s time and get to constitutional policing
For years, Albuquerque residents have worked with us to reestablish trust in policing. And we all know why. For too long, police leaders refused to work collaboratively to solve problems and resisted oversight, while a culture of accountability and exceptionalism eroded inside the department. As police shootings and lawsuits piled up, police leaders did little.
It finally took the City Council’s bold action to invite in the Department of Justice to halt the decline, and develop a framework and road map for constitutional, community policing.
Today, that same troubling pattern is again repeating itself in our community, and it deserves more attention. After Bernalillo County Sheriff Manny Gonzales’ deputies were involved in nine shootings in four months — far more than their APD counterparts in the same community serving under better rules — our sheriff says he still won’t use body cameras that are already funded because they could be used by the public and media to judge deputies under his leadership. That’s the point. And those of us who serve the public should have nothing to hide from the people who pay our salaries.
While Albuquerque’s police shootings and settlements are at near-record lows, the sheriff’s are rising at alarming rates.
I have an idea why. At neighborhood meetings in my council district in May and July, the sheriff — accompanied by his own videographer — announced his plan to be “very aggressive” in patrolling city neighborhoods. Most neighborhood leaders soundly rejected those proposals on those terms, as well as his requests to petition the City Council to pay for overtime to hire his deputies or, most absurdly, to turn all of APD over to him. Those proposals are as transparent as his recent hire of a political media consultant in his office and his openly considered run for mayor.
If he is truly interested in helping, there are things he can do. His own office holds 76,000 open warrants he is responsible for enforcing. Quick and certain enforcement would send a strong message to the hundreds of offenders APD officers encounter and arrest weekly committing new crimes while they should be in jail on old ones.
Instead, he is creating pop-up policing events that make for good press conferences — and possibly good campaign commercials — but leave little lasting impact. Worse, the sheriff’s outdated pursuit and use-of-force policies look like the ones Albuquerque worked so hard to abandon. And recklessly deploying his deputies into neighborhoods without knowing which of the more than 1,500 daily APD police calls they might stumble into, or worse, where they might encounter undercover APD officers working neighborhood drug, gun or auto theft investigations, is concerning, to say the least.
But these rogue sheriff issues are not limited to this sheriff alone.
The last sheriff cost taxpayers thousands to move sheriff’s staff to properties owned by his biggest campaign donor. Our current sheriff refuses to deploy cameras or engage in oversight. And, while gun violence ravages our community, Sheriff Gonzales went rogue, calling for “Second Amendment sanctuary county status,” meaning law enforcement under his control would not enforce gun laws we know can help stop gun violence.
It is time that county residents — including those of us in the city who pay county taxes and elect county office holders — consider other options. In a community this large and in an age of rape kit backlogs, CSI and Black Lives Matter, policing must be accountable on a daily basis — not once every four years. It might well be time to consider the creation of a professional county police department accountable to a professional police chief, hired and fired by the commission and overseen by a civilian oversight agency.
Today, built on a framework of communityled policing and civilian oversight, Albuquerque has lowered property crime by almost half, hired more than 100 new officers, each willing to wear a camera and share their work with the public. Cameras have helped to clear officers in more than 200 complaints through the police oversight board, saving us millions in investigation costs and unnecessary settlements, while also helping us identify and prosecute the rare few who violate the public’s trust and the law in our name.
If the sheriff wants to achieve lasting results and lower crime in the city, we can show him how. But first he has to implement the basic principles of accountability, transparency and constitutional policing that we require of every other hard-working officer working those same neighborhoods today.