A city shaken
State police are on the streets and officials acknowledge N.M.’s largest metro area has a serious crime problem, but some, citing improved statistics in 2019, say residents are plagued by another issue: Perception
BALBUQUERQUE efore Theresa Garcia moved from Los Angeles to New Mexico’s largest city in 1987, she imagined she would live in a peaceful place where people relaxed on their patios, drinking iced tea at sunset.
At first, Garcia said, Albuquerque was a good and relatively safe city to call home. But over the years, she’s watched the city languish, becoming a magnet for crime and a good place for bad characters to do business.
“I’m done with Albuquerque,” the 57-year-old grandmother of 10 said while standing behind a 6-foot-tall wrought iron fence in a troubled area of the city called the International District by some and notoriously known by others as the War Zone.
“The crime rate, the shootings, everything,” she said. “I mean, it’s gotten bad.”
The spate of violent crime in Albuquerque has left residents like Garcia feeling under siege and in fear for their safety as the city continues to grapple with what police Deputy Chief Harold Medina calls a “very serious crime issue.”
“Our 2017 numbers saw numbers that were alarming — some of the highest crime rates that the city of Albuquerque has ever experienced,” Medina said.
A recent survey of 2017 per capita murder rates in major cities across the U.S. ranked Albuquerque No. 24 — ahead of such major metropolitan areas as New York City, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Dallas.
Christopher Lyons, a professor in the University of New Mexico Department of Sociology, said crime, especially violent crime, often creates what he calls “moral panics,” or widespread social concern that speaks to the core values of society.
“Few problems create more public anxiety than the fear of violence, and it is only worse when young lives are taken tragically and senselessly,” he wrote in an email. “These recent tragic events make us all question the well-being of our city and our society.”
While Albuquerque residents have grown accustomed to reports of violent crime, two recent highprofile killings and a torrent of lawlessness in April shook the city.
Earlier this month, a 23-year-old University of New Mexico baseball player, Jackson Weller, was gunned down outside a nightclub in Nob Hill. The highly publicized homicide happened less than two weeks after Jose Hernandez, a 47-year-old postal worker, was shot to death on his route while trying to stop a fight between a teenager and his mother.
The crime problems in New Mexico’s population and economic hub are having a ripple effect across the state, Lyons wrote, adding that the violent crime rate for the whole state has been high for some time.
“Certainly, it is hard for the state to move forward with economic and social progress if its major city is seen to be struggling with violence,” he wrote. “But perhaps most concerning, fear of crime can undermine a sense of pride and ownership in our community. Crime can stigmatize communities, and that stigma can make economic, social, and civic life more challenged.”
The pervasive crime issues plaguing Albuquerque and creating uncertainty among its residents were not lost on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. At the governor’s direction, 50 New Mexico State Police officers have been assigned to targeted areas in the Duke City to fight crime.
“Violent crime in Albuquerque is a scourge, and we will attack the roots of that scourge with targeted deployments of manpower and resources,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement May 10. “New Mexico residents must be free to have every expectation of safety in their homes and communities.”
The so-called War Zone, largely located in Albuquerque’s Southeast Heights, was teeming with state police last week.
“We just noticed that there’s been a lot more cops here,” Christopher Creech said after state police Officer Mark Reiff pulled him and his girlfriend over for an inoperable brake light on a red sedan they recently purchased.
The recent series of gun-related violence, including homicides, coupled with Mayor Tim Keller’s effort “to do everything that he can … made it clear to me that I needed to step up immediately,” Lujan Grisham said in an interview with The New Mexican.
“If we’ve got a crime issue in Albuquerque … you’ve got a potential for crime and public safety issues statewide,” she said.
Lujan Grisham acknowledged crime could have dramatic negative effects on the rest of the state but also pointed to the recent addition of 300 jobs at Intel in nearby Rio Rancho as a bit of good news.
“People know that we’re actually, frankly, on economic fire, if you will, because we have all the right tools and opportunities here, and I’m going to put them to use,” she said. “However, making sure that people are in fact safe is always the responsibility of every leader in the state, and I think it can have impacts on continuing how well we’re doing economically. Why would anyone take that risk? Even if it had no impact economically, it is untenable and absolutely unacceptable that people aren’t safe, that we have a crime issue and that we aren’t addressing it.”
But one of the most visible components of the crime-fighting effort in Albuquerque hit turbulence last week. On Thursday, less than a week after the governor issued her directive, two state police officers were involved in separate shootings an hour apart in Albuquerque, generating concerns from a local coalition of nonprofits, community organizations and individuals advocating for police reform in Albuquerque.
“For years the Albuquerque Police Department operated with impunity, shooting and killing someone practically every month. We don’t want to return to those days,” Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU of New Mexico, said Friday in a statement. “We’re deeply concerned that the deployment of New Mexico State Police officers in our communities threatens to wreck progress towards constitutional policing in Albuquerque at a time when there is still much reform to be made.”
As far as crime goes, though, Albuquerque, which has been adding 100 officers to its force and rolling out other initiatives to fight crime, appears to be turning a corner. Despite some recent high-profile incidents, the city’s violent crime rate has been declining so far this year.
“I realize everyone is calling this a ‘crime wave’ or ‘crime crisis,’ but it is important to note that the 26 homicides [so far this year] is below the 33 homicides at this time last year,” police spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said. “Every other property and violent crime category is also down from last year.”
Though crime may be trending downward in the first part of the year, some Albuquerque residents who have been waking up to alarming headlines and seeing the carnage on the streets in nightly newscasts say they no longer feel safe.
Albuquerque native Erika Almanzar, a 25-year-old student at UNM, said she’s stopped going out alone at night. “I don’t like going anywhere without my boyfriend,” she said. “I usually wait until he gets off work to go anywhere.”
Almanzar, who grew up in Albuquerque’s North Valley, said the crime problem is affecting people’s quality of life. She said she remembers playing outside until dark when she was a kid, but the generation after her doesn’t have the same freedom.
“My mom wouldn’t be afraid to let us out,” she said. “We would stay until like the lights came on, and we would just play on the road and stuff. I have nephews now, and my mom is even afraid to let them out in the yard and stuff. She tells them to wait until an adult is there for them to go play outside.”
Almanzar also said she’s been a victim of crime. Though nothing was stolen, she said all the windows of her car were shattered last month.
“Even your cars aren’t safe, to be honest,” she said. “There was actually like seven cars in my neighborhood that had their windows broken.”
Another Albuquerque native, Sara Trammel, 34, who operates a coffee and doughnut shop out of a doubledecker bus off Central Avenue in Nob Hill — not far from where the UNM baseball player was shot earlier this month — said she doesn’t accept cash at her food truck out of concern she’ll be robbed.
“My husband was carjacked back in October at gunpoint, so the crime in this city is very real to us,” she said. “He was just driving his car in the morning to the grocery store. That is when he was chased down and a gun was pointed at him.”
Carlos Hernandez, 55, said he’s lived in Albuquerque for about 30 years and has just gotten used to the lawlessness. “It’s concerning, but I’ve grown accustomed to it because I’ve lived here so many years,” Hernandez said in Spanish.
“When I first started to live here,” he said, referring to the International District, “everything was calm and quiet, but then it got worse and worse.”
Resident perceptions about Albuquerque’s crime problem appear to depend on where they live.
“We’re fortunate,” said 87-year-old William Baugh as he and his wife, Mary, walked on a dirt track around Stardust Skies Park in a more affluent part of the city’s Northeast Heights. “Our little neighborhood is one of the quietest in town.”
Baugh and his wife, who have lived in Albuquerque for 50 years, said they have two perceptions about crime in their city: “Our personal experience and what we read in the paper and see on TV.”
Lyons, the UNM professor, said the news media often fuels public anxiety over the fear of violence.
“There is a fine line between informing with the aim of empowering the public and sensationalizing with the aim of get better ratings,” he wrote, adding that the drop in violent crime this year “often gets lost amid the public outcry.”
Albuquerque City Councilor Pat Davis said Albuquerque’s crime problems are real, but the city is also making progress.
“People are not not going out to eat. They’re not not going shopping,” he said. “But I think people are saying, ‘We are willing to step up and do whatever it takes to address this,’ because there’s always a concern that somebody you know could be next.”
Davis said the Albuquerque City Council added $3 million to the police department’s hiring program last year.
“We fast-tracked two years of hiring into one,” he said. “We’re making headway a lot quicker than we lost traction, but it’s going to be a long summer because we’re not quite there yet, and that’s why we asked for help from the state police.”
Medina, the deputy police chief, agreed the city’s crime situation is improving. The city, for example, is no longer No. 1 in the nation for auto theft, he said.
“We had a decrease in homicides even, and as we translate into 2019, we started the year a little rough on homicides,” he said. “January wasn’t our best month, but it was on pace with other months during the year. February, we had a little bit of reduction. We had a wonderful March. And then we get into April, the weather gets hotter and all of a sudden we have this rash of homicides in the month of April.”
Between April 6 and April 12, for example, Albuquerque police investigated seven homicides.
“As we attack crime from all sides throughout Albuquerque, there is much work to be done to get the results we want to see,” Mayor Keller said in a statement at the time. “My heart goes out to the families who have lost loved ones. We keep them at the heart our efforts as we face these deep challenges.”