Policing the Policing Crisis in Albuquerque

[On the way to the meeting yesterday, I passed a wreck in the middle of an intersection. A motorcycle lay mangled in the road, ambulances were assembled, and there were at least half a dozen police engaged with traffic control and assisting the injured. It was a common enough scene in Albuquerque -- as the "best drivers" tend to congregate here -- but it was in stark contrast to the generally negative view so many people have of the APD. Just wanted to make that note...]

The Department of Justice released a scathing report on the unconstitutional policing practices of the Albuquerque Police Department on April 10, and ever since there have been numerous community meetings and actions to attempt to address those findings and rein in a police department that has become a militarized gang -- or at least has been perceived as one by large parts of the Albuquerque community.

Perhaps the most poignant moment of last night's meeting came at the end, when the 6 year old nephew of Kendall Carroll -- shot to death by a State Police sniper, but fired on by APD -- got up before the stragglers in the audience and said very simply: "Why did they shoot my uncle?"

His mother, Kendall Carroll's sister, testified earlier that her she and her son were traumatized by what had happened that afternoon, that they would never get over it, and her son was terrified of police, and he shouldn't be, no one should be. She said, "They shot the wrong brother, and they don't care. It's nothing to them." She wore a hoodie with the bold statement on the back, "Fuck the APD." Her brother was shot and killed by NM State Police sniper Shane Todd, who would later be deployed not far from my own home out in the country where he shot and killed Ernest Attebery who was alleged to have exchanged gunfire with police, but who it was later determined had not fired on police. I understand better now why even the sheriff of the county, who believed the situation was under control, was shocked that the State Police sniper had killed the suspect. Just as Kendall Carroll's family is still in shock that the same sniper killed "the wrong brother" in Albuquerque in March of 2013.

Half the country is asking "What in the world is going on out there?"

Good question.

There is no simple answer. Attempts have been made for decades to get control of the slaughter by local police, but all have so far failed. Those who seek simple answers say it is all about race, and it isn't. There is a racial component in that the poor, the homeless, and the underserved mentally ill fall victim to policing practices that lead to their deaths, and in Albuquerque, like most other cities, the poor, the homeless and the underserved mentally ill are disproportionately from minority communities. But racism and racial profiling are not the sole motivation -- nor, in my view, are they even the major motivation -- for the bloody record of the APD and other NM police forces.

No, there's something else going on.

Some of those who testified last night pointed to what it may be.

For one thing, the mayor does not attend these meetings, nor does he attend City Council meetings. Two members of the council did attend last night, at least for a while, but the mayor's priorities do not include -- and apparently have never included -- dealing with the public or even hearing the public on matters of police abuse and murder as detailed by the hundreds who have attended these and other meetings and who have marched and protested the continued use of deadly force by APD.

"He doesn't care."

Mayor Richard Berry has long defended the APD's policies and use of deadly force, and he did so right up to the shocking execution of James Boyd in the Sandia foothills. That incident, in which a mentally disturbed individual was shot six times in the back as he was surrendering, was then shot three more times with beanbags as he lay bleeding out on the ground, and then was attacked repeatedly by a police dog before he died, seemed to momentarily alert Berry to the fact that there might actually be something wrong with APD's policies and practices.

He called the Boyd shooting a "game changer."

Protests mounted, but the shooting and killing went on, and finally, the DoJ report was issued, condemning the APD for its pattern of actions which clearly violated the Constitution and which required immediate remedy.

But the shooting and killing still goes on.

Nothing seems to stop it, and the mayor doesn't honestly seem to care at all. Nor does the police chief.

If they did, the shooting and the killing might have been significantly reduced or stopped altogether long ago.

But instead, it continues, as if nothing has changed, no DoJ report had been issued condemning the actions of the APD, no protests had taken place, no world wide revulsion at what has been going on in Albuquerque for years had arisen.

Nothing seems to have penetrated the shells of denial and disinterest of Albuquerque's powers that be.

Even when one of their own children is killed by police, they don't seem to care. Not enough, at any rate, to penetrate their denial and demand change.

During the meeting yesterday, I was sitting next to a woman whose grandson had been shot and killed by police in Los Lunas a few days before; in 1988 her nephew had been shot and killed by Albuquerque police. Both, she said, had suffered from PTSD -- a common enough complaint among those gathered to hear one another's testimony -- and neither deserved to be killed.

She struck me as a level-headed, heavy-hearted grandmother as so many of the speakers last night did. Even the younger speakers were so very heavy of heart for having lost a loved one or having been subjected to police abuse and misconduct, whether simply being intimidated by officers' rage and threats, or being bludgeoned or gassed or injured and trussed up while medical care was denied.

One man spoke eloquently of his son, a military veteran and victim of PTSD, who had been shot in the arm by a drive-by assailant -- an assailant known to both the police and the victim. When assistance was called for, medical aid was denied to the shooting victim by the police. Even family members who tried to render aid were forbidden to do so and one was arrested for trying.

The assailant was identified but never charged. The man wondered if his son had been targeted for death by the police.

And so it was with so many. They were sad, they were angry, they were frightened, they were determined.

Even if they hadn't lost a loved one to police violence, they knew, they knew. They felt the pain, they felt the loss of those who did.

One of the organizers of the protests and a major factor in the entire endeavor to bring the APD to account, DinahVargas, explained how she had become radicalized toward police violence. She said she'd only known what she saw on the teevee, and every time the police shot someone, she noticed that there was an almost immediate campaign of vilification and demonization by the police and the media regarding whoever had been shot this time. They were always "druggies with long criminal records and tattoos," and she said she thought, "Wait, I have tattoos..." And she went to a protest and she got to know some of the people who'd been shot or abused by the police or whose loved ones had been killed, and she realized they were mostly just ordinary people who'd been caught up in madness, and she knew it was wrong, it couldn't be right. These were her friends and neighbors, her own family, her grandparents, herself. They weren't demons, they were people. They were people who'd been horribly abused and some had been killed by members of a police department which never, ever found any of the killings unjustified.

Ever.

But it's more than just the police. It's an entire governing system and a system of authority in which accountability for actions is only valid downward. A police review commission was established, and when they tried to do some independent investigations to find out basic information about police abuse in Albuquerque, they were thwarted at every turn by the City Attorney and the District Attorney who told them quite simply that they didn't have any authority but to agree with the police's own investigations.

The Mayor, the City Administrator and the Police Chief are notorious for stonewalling, lying, sidestepping, and avoiding anything to do with police accountability.

The power structure of Albuquerque clearly likes things just the way they are and will resist any effort to change. 


The DoJ held these meetings in order to assemble public input to use in a consent decree by which the City and the APD would agree to certain specific reforms and a timetable for their accomplishment.

Many of those at the meeting have long insisted that the only way to accomplish real and lasting reform is to put APD under direct DoJ supervision, and to replace all the current brass -- and to jail those officers who have used egregious deadly force.

V. B. Price has suggested the only way forward may be to abolish APD and start over (a suggestion I tend to think is correct, but one that is unlikely to get anywhere.)

Too many people have been hurt too badly for too long for the situation to become stable as is. There is a movement afoot to recall the mayor and the district attorney and to fire the Independent Review Officer of the Police Oversight Commission. The commission itself has essentially disbanded as it's seen its efforts consistently interfered with by the Mayor's Office and the City Attorney.

Yet the killing goes on -- and on and on.

The killing goes on because the powers that be want it that way. Their minds must be changed for an effective change to occur in the Albuquerque Police Department.

Until that happens, we're going to be subject to a continuation of the Wild West mentality, where anything goes -- until a stop is put to it.
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Some resources:

 http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/

October 22 Coaliton Photos

Life in Albuquerque: Another Police Shooting, Another Community Meeting, Another Candlelight Vigil

From 2012 -- Rally Against Police Violence  (These people are still vital to the movement.)

Dispatches from the DoJ Meetings Part 2 (Brief description of the meeting I attended)

V. B. Price: Unconstitutional

The New Normal: This Is The Way The World Works... Now

The Ukrainian Thing seems to have stalled for the moment, as the mighty troops sent to smoke out the terrorists holding those public buildings in the Eastern Sector have an annoying tendency to run away or get caught by the refusniks. It would be funny if this were some fictional place in Mittel Europe pre-WWII, and the Marx Brothers made a movie about it.

Oh wait.

But it's the real thing. Insofar as these things are ever "real" -- in the sense that ordinary people and/or the high and the mighty can ever know fully what is really going on and the consequences thereof... it's real enough. People are being shot and killed and kidnapped and manhandled and otherwise being put through the wringer -- one that looks very much like gangland behavior under chaotic, ruthless, and lawless conditions. Everybody has their stick, their bat, their AK-47, their new camo uniform, their balaklava...

At least there are some productive uses for all the old tires in Ukrainia. Wouldn't want them to go to waste.

Meanwhile, the posturing by the principals goes on and on and on and on, in a kind of dance or minuet, something we haven't seen in quite this way since the run up to the tragedies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because the principals are behaving now very much the way they did then -- though they say that they have taken military adventuring off the table and they are clearly trying to fight an old-fashioned proxy war through their surrogates on the ground in Ukrainia -- people everywhere are nervous as heck. No doubt the survivalists are stockpiling even more goods for the ultimate End of Times they sincerely believe is so soon to come.

This is all dangerous as heck, given the fact that the Superpowers are involved, the nuclear armed states, the Global Terror States of times gone by, when only they, the USA and the Soviet Union, had nukes and were brandishing and rattling them at one another...

So it is once again... except... for something. Something has changed.

Oh, that's right. One of the Superpowers, the other one, the Soviet Union, no longer exists. And its successor, the Russian Federation ("Russia") is a pale shadow of its former incarnation. A picked apart pale shadow of what it once was at that, ringed with hostile and in some cases competitive independent states aligned with, often hosting the military of, the vaunted "West" -- led by the USofA. So... what's this all about?

I've pointed out several times now what I think is going on, really going on, and though I haven't gotten much into why (the Global Great Game interests me less than its consequences to the ordinary people on the ground), I have little doubt that what's happening is the result of a Game-play that went wrong. It's "real" in that real people are being made to suffer for the forced and unforced errors of their Betters (as always, no?) and it's "real" in that the capture by the EU of the EU's Eastern Partnership nations (Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia) is a fundamental policy objective.

Regardless of what happened in Kiev, in other words, the EU, NATO and the US would have been pursuing policy goals to capture ever more territory and peoples from the orbit of the Russian Federation. It's apparently hard-wired into the EU's self-conception as technically assisted by the US.

Russia, for its part, has not been able to resist, and really hasn't resisted until now. Even now, the Russian resistance is more guerrilla-esque than military. What happened in Vilnius last November -- and its consequences in Kiev -- seems to have taken the Kremlin by as much surprise as it did in Brussels, Berlin, London and Washington.

Yanukovych was apparently expected by all parties to sign the Integration Agreement he was presented with at the Vilnius Conference of the EU's Eastern Partnership on November 29, 2013, and he refused. They say that he saw the actual terms of the agreement for the first time at that meeting, on the last day of the meeting, and he balked. Those terms -- which I seem to have misplaced the link to for the moment -- were devastating to the Ukrainian people, forcing them ever further into poverty, and they basically turned over the very fragile sovereignty of Ukraine to unelected technocrats and strategic wonks at the IMF, the European Central Bank, and NATO. Under the terms Yanukovych was presented, Ukraine would effectively become a colonial possession of the EU and NATO.

He was expected by all concerned -- including the Kremlin, apparently -- to sign away what limited patrimony Ukraine had in order to receive an economic package from the EU/IMF that would primarily benefit Ukraine's Russian creditors. Shockingly, he said no.

Nyet.

Oh.

Almost immediately protests and demonstrations formed in the Maidan Square in Kiev, somewhat patterned on the Color Revolution/Occupy model (with some interesting and important differences), and Yanukovych's government was subjected to typical subversion and destabilization tactics that have long been employed by "Color Revolutionists" in Eastern Europe and around the world. Occupy never used those tactics, which may be a clue to why Occupy never overthrew any government. It wasn't trying to. That wasn't its purpose. But overthrow and replacement of governments was very much a part of the main objective of Color Revolutions, including the "Orange Revolution" that had occurred in Kiev in the winter of 2004-2005.

Yanukovych had messed with his masters in Brussels, Berlin, London, Washington -- and Moscow, apparently -- and he had to go, one way or another.

And so it would be. The Maidan Model included a level of violence that had not been seen in these Color Revolutions previously, a truly shocking level of violence culminating in shadowy and unknown snipers firing on the crowds assembled at the square. Prior to that still mysterious event, however, the police had been routinely firebombed with Molotov cocktails, and armed and violent gangs of fascists and Nazis (yeah, the real thing) had patrolled the perimeters and enforced "discipline" on the crowd and they periodically stormed and took over government buildings in the center of Kiev and in other towns in Western Ukraine.

Much of what is being done in the East now is based quite closely on the Maidan Model, albeit with the absence of the large crowds of demonstrators that were typical of the Maidan protests. The difference has to do, I'm sure, with the fact that the crowds in Kiev were fired on by those snipers... the same could easily happen to large crowds elsewhere. It has happened in other cases.

Snipering the crowds of protestors was typical of the 2013 post-coup Cairo Model of dispersing demonstrators; they were shot at, and many were killed or wounded, by snipers strategically emplaced around the pro-Morsi demonstrations. So it would be in Kiev as well. This tactic tends to limit the number of demonstrators who will turn out... it also has an effect on who and what demonstrators will support.

The coup-regime in Kiev, as it's called, has agreed to the terms that the EU/IMF/NATO et al tried to impose on the Yanukovych government, with the proviso, apparently, that the funding not go to Russian creditors, only to EU creditors. Interesting.

When Yanukovych balked in Vilnius, Russia -- specifically Putin -- was blamed, though it's not at all clear that Putin engineered the last-minute refusal by Yanukovych to sign on the dotted line. Russia had offered a different deal to Ukraine, but its terms were only slightly less onerous and exploitative. The issue seemed to be one of a tug-of-war between the EU and RF for Ukraine's future. The people were not to be consulted. They were simply to be led. In whichever direction the leadership and elites (in this part of the world, read: "Oligarchs") wanted to go.

Apparently, Yanukovych wanted to blaze his own path, and thought he could do it best under Russian aegis.

Well, that didn't work out.

In other words, Yanukovych's refusal triggered a cascade of unanticipated events that no only led to his overthrow and ouster and the installation of an EU/NATO approved coup-regime in Kiev, but to the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and the stalemate now in place on Ukraine's eastern borders, which stalemate could lead to some kind of nuclear exchange between the EU/US/NATO -- out of sheer incompetence if not strategy.

I say these were not anticipated events, in part because most of it looks to be ad hoc, even the Maidan protests that were clearly rather carefully organized and remarkably well presented via professional public relations efforts. The preparations for the Maidan protests had clearly been made in advance and were carried out as efficiently as possible, but there were so many uncoordinated aspects of it that didn't fit the pre-conceived and arranged pattern of these sorts of things. The enormous stage and the demagoguery  that was conducted from it seemed to me to be one of those ad hoc rather than pre-planned arrangements. Even the snipering that climaxed the demonstrations seemed to be ad hoc rather than pre-planned. The use of Nazis and fascists as shock troops may well have come about spontaneously.

In other words, while the demonstrations and assemblies seemed pretty well planned in advance (if, for example, the Yanukovych government refused some aspect of the EU integration agreements) the fact that he refused the whole thing was the surprise, and the response became much more spontaneous, vigorous -- and violent -- than was anticipated.

I've pointed out that the ground was laid long before the uprising by the hundreds of "educational" and "democracy" NGOs that had been operating in Ukraine for decades before the Maidan protests. Many of them were dedicated to EU "integration" -- and that has been the focus of the Kiev coup-regime ever since they seized power in February.

The coup-regime was allowed to seize power, however. They didn't have the means or authority to seize it on their own. Yanukovych's flight from Kiev seems to have been arranged by the Kremlin, a flight which enabled the almost immediate installation of a pre-selected group of financiers, technocrats and Nazi-bullies to rule. But it couldn't have happened if Yanukovych hadn't fled. That he did so under a Russian wing indicates to me that the Kremlin was OK with his overthrow, and indeed may have been behind it. (He was, after all, a bumbler at best.)

What the Kremlin is not OK with is the EU/NATO/US take over of Ukraine without recognition of Russian national interest. The fact that the Kiev coup-regime and its backers deny there is a legitimate Russian interest in Ukraine is the key flashpoint which can -- especially through the incompetence of the elites involved -- lead directly to severely unpleasant consequences, such as an unfortunate nuclear exchange.

The partition and dismemberment of the Russian Federation is one of those long term projects of the ruling class in the West that won't soon be accomplished and won't soon go away. Russia is to be eliminated as a major global influence and power according to long-standing neo-conservative principles. Once that's accomplished, then China.

These are insane principles, but they're now the New Normal.

It's the way the world works.