Fed Probe To Focus On APD Culture

• For more info on the DOJ investigation, view “APD Under Fire“

Thomas E. Perez, right, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, speaks at a news conference announcing a U.S.D.O.J. investigation into APD’s use of excessive deadly force, on Tuesday Nov. 27, 2012. Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry, left, and APD Police Chief Ray Shultz, center. (Pat Vasquez-Cunningham/Journal)

The U.S. Justice Department has a tall order ahead of it: investigating the police culture in Albuquerque.

The man in charge of determining whether APD has a pattern or practice of violating people’s civil rights is Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez, a veteran of dozens of police investigations, including 14 that are ongoing.

During a news conference in Albuquerque this week, Perez described getting to the core of troubled police departments this way: “When you open up one door, thinking that’s the only door you’ll open, you often find that there are five more doors and a few windows and maybe an attic and even a trap door that you have to go through.”

So, how to do it?

Reports produced after previous DOJ police investigations and a lengthy Journal interview with Perez provide a few clues.

The focus of the investigation here will be APD’s use of force and whether it meets constitutional requirements more often than not.

“We’re not inquiring into whether Officer X used excessive force on this day or that day,” Perez said.

Ongoing federal criminal investigations, which Perez said he could not comment on, are focused on the actions of individual officers in specific situations.

As Perez puts it, unconstitutional use of force is, in a way, a symptom of something deeper.

The larger civil investigation of APD is “looking at whether the department as a whole has a pattern or practice of misconduct,” Perez said in the interview.

That means picking apart what he calls APD’s “accountability mechanisms” by considering the role everyone in the department plays: from the rookie patrolman who may have been involved in an on-duty physical altercation to the sergeant who reviewed that incident to the Internal Affairs investigator assigned to the case and all the way up to Police Chief Ray Schultz, who has final say over discipline.

Interviews with police leaders, union leaders, rank-and-file officers and community members and reviews of use of force reports, policies and other documents will help investigators determine the difference between what’s on paper at APD and what actually happens on the street, Perez said.

Accountability

Justice Department reports on the Seattle Police Department and New Orleans Police Department showed substantial problems with internal controls, including with the way those departments’ internal affairs divisions handled use of force investigations. Too often, the reports found, use of force incidents weren’t investigated sufficiently and discipline was inconsistent.

“We saw in a number of the departments that we have investigated to date that there was not a sufficient culture of accountability,” Perez said in the interview. “It was reflected in training and … in internal mechanisms of accountability … That’s what we’ll be taking a very careful look at here.”

APD officers have shot at 25 men since 2010, striking 23 of them. Seventeen have died. None of the officers has faced criminal charges or administrative discipline, although some of the Internal Affairs cases are still pending.

APD also has had a series of high-profile embarrassments that didn’t involve shootings, including an incident last year in which one officer was caught on video tape repeatedly kicking a suspect in the head while another officer held him down. Both officers were fired.

In Albuquerque, “We will be looking invariably at internal affairs processes and how they deal with use of force,” Perez said. “You have to – and if you look at the work we’ve done elsewhere – you need to diagnose what some of the underlying root causes are or problems.”

In Seattle, for example, there wasn’t a sufficient firewall between criminal and internal affairs investigators, who aren’t supposed to share information.

Before giving statements to internal affairs investigators, police officers are read what is called a “Garrity warning.” The name stems from the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Garrity vs. New Jersey.

Under “Garrity,” officers give statements in which they can’t assert their Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination and refuse to answer questions, and they must be truthful even if it’s against their own self interest and may eventually cost them their jobs. However, statements made under “Garrity” can’t be used against officers in criminal proceedings.

The DOJ investigation in Seattle determined that the police department there used an “inappropriate blanket invocation of Garrity (which) may result in the exclusion of important evidence from an investigation.”

“SPD’s failure to shield criminal investigators from Garrity materials could taint and render unusable other critical evidence,” according to a letter from federal investigators to city leaders there. “Put simply: This practice makes it too difficult to quickly exonerate officers who have followed policy and to properly discipline officers who have not. Further, these practices compromise the ability of prosecutors or other outside agencies to adequately assess incidents and to hold officers accountable for their actions.”

Training

The Justice Department also will look at the training APD officers receive to determine whether it plays a role in how they use force, Perez said.

This year, APD hired a civilian, who is a former federal official, to run its training academy. Joe Wolf’s mandate is to shift the academy away from “paramilitary” training methods and emphasize communication skills and de-escalation techniques.

Perez has not provided a timetable for when the APD civil rights investigation will wrap up.

He said investigating APD – as with any other police department he has investigated – will be “a difficult task.”

“Culture change does not occur overnight,” he said. “Culture change takes time.”

— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal