This isn’t the police oversight ABQ was promised in 2014

Welcome to the latest episode of “Trust me, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” This week’s theme is police oversight, minus the oversight.

Because back in 2014, the public was told that per a settlement agreement between the city of Albuquerque and the U.S. Department of Justice, the newly minted Albuquerque Civilian Police Oversight Agency board would provide “meaningful, independent review of all citizen complaints, serious uses of force and officer-involved shootings by APD.”

That was an important piece of rebuilding the public’s trust in the department. DOJ had just issued a scathing report saying that APD had a pattern and practice of violating civil rights with its misuse of force. Much of the report focused on police shootings, including the fatal shooting of James Boyd, a schizophrenic homeless man camping illegally in the Sandia foothills.

Five years later, it is beyond disturbing to learn the CPOA board hasn’t been reviewing officer-involved shooting cases for more than a year. According to a story Monday by Journal reporter Elise Kaplan, the board hasn’t seen any police shooting cases in 14 months — and the last one it was allowed to review was from 2015.

And it’s not because there have been zero police shootings since then. A quick review of Journal news stories reveals there were seven in 2016 and at least two in 2017, six in 2018 and five this year.

At best, this lack of review is evidence of astounding bureaucratic ineptitude. At worst, it’s an insidious, intentional scheme to thwart the organization and everything it was established to do But there’s more. Kaplan pointed out that not only has the CPOA board not reviewed any cases other than civilian complaints in more than a year, but the pipeline is jammed further upstream. Another oversight body, the Force Review Board, was set up by the same settlement agreement with the caveat that its panel of APD officials, City Attorney’s Office representatives and the CPOA executive director would see cases before they ended up in the hands of CPOA board members.

But FRB is in the midst of a restructuring and isn’t actually looking into any cases right now.

So none of those serious incidents is getting reviewed by anybody. Kaplan noted that neither an APD spokesman nor the City Attorney’s Office responded to questions, including about how big the backlog is.

That’s unacceptable, especially when you’re trying to rebuild the public’s trust in you and the job you do.

It makes no sense that the FRB being down for maintenance should mean the civilian panel can’t do its job. Now we’ve got a backlog to deal with and serious use-offorce and police shooting cases not getting the important double-check system that was supposed to rebuild public trust in APD.

APD and the city should be transparent about the number of shootings involving police as well as the backlog in reviewing them and should work with the DOJ to fasttrack getting the FRB and CPOA boards back to the serious task at hand. The public’s trust depends on it.