In Albuquerque, a shocking history of police abuse

Radley Balko, WashPost

Last week, the Department of Justice issued a damning report on the use of force among police officers in Albuquerque. Among the DOJ findings:

• Albuquerque cops “too often use deadly force in an unconstitutional manner in their use of firearms.” The report points to 20 shootings by the city’s police between 2009-2012, a majority of which the DOJ found to be constitutional violations. Moreover, investigators found that city police “often use deadly force in circumstances where there is no imminent threat of death or serious body harm” to the police or anyone else, and that cops have used lethal force against people who are a “minimal threat” or pose no threat at all to anyone other than themselves.
• The city’s police offices also have a record of using “less lethal force” in ways that violate the Constitution, including a pattern of using Tasers on people who posed little to no threat to the police or the public, and in ways that made things more dangerous, such as on a man who had doused himself in gasoline.
• Albuquerque police routinely escalated situations by using physical force instead of efforts aimed at peaceful conflict resolution.
• The city gives its police officers insufficient training on interacting with people suffering from mental illness or suffering some sort of mental crisis.
• The report emphasizes that these incidents are “not isolated or sporadic,” but represent a pattern set by bad policies, including insufficient training and lax oversight.
• “In nearly all cases” that the DOJ reviewed, APD supervisors confirmed their officers’ account of an incident, “even when officers’ accounts were incomplete, were inconsistent with other evidence, or were based on canned or repetitive language.”
• More troubling still, in cases where outside entities did find that city police had used unreasonable force, police department supervisors responded by lavishing praise on those officers, even holding them up as examples other officers ought to follow.

(More here.)