1. The way I see it, Medina is either lying or an idiot. His signature is on the approval for SOP 2-8 which mandates the activation of OBRD; so did he sign it without reading it or willfully ignore it? Neither is acceptable of the chief of police. Besides, he has had extensive interaction with the disciplinary process and must understand the principles of e.g. Garrity protections.
2. Some of the details of this story relate to the particular structure of police oversight in Albuquerque. Albuquerque was an early city to face a DOJ consent decree, and perhaps for that reason many decisions were made that appear, in hindsight, to have been mistakes. Unfortunately, attempts to fix these problems have usually taken the form of adding more oversight bodies. The result is a complex set of internal and external review boards with differing scopes and jurisdictions. No small number of serious incidents become lost in the morass of overlapping review boards, leading to delays that often push them out of the CBA timeline for imposing discipline. There is a lesson here about designing oversight programs.
3. Corruption in APD's professional standards bureau has been an ongoing concern, with a former commanding officer recently removed in relation to a bribery scandal. Despite this context, Medina seems oddly untouchable. This can mostly be attributed to the strong support that he, for some reason, receives from mayor Tim Keller. One speculates that Keller is afraid of appearing "soft on crime" given the political focus on public safety. There is a mechanism for City Council to remove the Chief of Police but it is indirect and requires two supermajority votes. There have been attempts but so far they have not succeeded. Through the indirectness of politics, a public focus on safety and crime seems to have a tendency to engender blind support for the police, and ironically City Council's opposition to APD leadership mostly comes not from civil rights and accountability concerns but from, well, the perception that they are ineffective even in busting heads.
4. The DOJ consent decree period is now coming to an end, the department having been deemed to have met reform requirements. While the decade of DOJ-supervised reform efforts was expensive in time and money, it's not clear that it's really changed anything on the ground. APD policy has significantly improved, but even by the observations of the DOJ's monitor, compliance is not very good. Paperwork efforts can only get you so far, a cautionary tale for other cities undergoing a DOJ reform process.
Perhaps the national attention on this incident will lead to some good... I think the only thing that can be done right now is to put pressure on the mayor's office to insist on major change in the leadership of APD.
2. Some of the details of this story relate to the particular structure of police oversight in Albuquerque. Albuquerque was an early city to face a DOJ consent decree, and perhaps for that reason many decisions were made that appear, in hindsight, to have been mistakes. Unfortunately, attempts to fix these problems have usually taken the form of adding more oversight bodies. The result is a complex set of internal and external review boards with differing scopes and jurisdictions. No small number of serious incidents become lost in the morass of overlapping review boards, leading to delays that often push them out of the CBA timeline for imposing discipline. There is a lesson here about designing oversight programs.
3. Corruption in APD's professional standards bureau has been an ongoing concern, with a former commanding officer recently removed in relation to a bribery scandal. Despite this context, Medina seems oddly untouchable. This can mostly be attributed to the strong support that he, for some reason, receives from mayor Tim Keller. One speculates that Keller is afraid of appearing "soft on crime" given the political focus on public safety. There is a mechanism for City Council to remove the Chief of Police but it is indirect and requires two supermajority votes. There have been attempts but so far they have not succeeded. Through the indirectness of politics, a public focus on safety and crime seems to have a tendency to engender blind support for the police, and ironically City Council's opposition to APD leadership mostly comes not from civil rights and accountability concerns but from, well, the perception that they are ineffective even in busting heads.
4. The DOJ consent decree period is now coming to an end, the department having been deemed to have met reform requirements. While the decade of DOJ-supervised reform efforts was expensive in time and money, it's not clear that it's really changed anything on the ground. APD policy has significantly improved, but even by the observations of the DOJ's monitor, compliance is not very good. Paperwork efforts can only get you so far, a cautionary tale for other cities undergoing a DOJ reform process.
Perhaps the national attention on this incident will lead to some good... I think the only thing that can be done right now is to put pressure on the mayor's office to insist on major change in the leadership of APD.