ABQ Ride says safety is a priority amid rise in security calls. The data lacks specifics

For about a year, Denise Muniz Archibeque has been a motorcoach operator in Albuquerque. She drives city buses on Central Avenue, often in the early morning hours.

In that year, Muniz Archibeque said drivers like her are taking on more than they should, especially when it comes to addressing crime, homelessness and disorderly conduct on their routes.

“These issues are undermining drivers’ well-being and the reliability of our public transportation system,” Muniz Archibeque told the City Council on June 2. “Our key problems are aggressive and abusive behavior. Drivers endure verbal abuse, threats and frequent physical assaults. I’m one of them.”

Muniz Archibeque’s public comments elicited a reaction from many members of the City Council, particularly regarding the city’s workforce of bus drivers. ABQ Ride data shows there are 94 vacancies out of 256 funded positions — a vacancy rate of about 37%.

Transit officials said showing when and where instances of violence, crime, or misconduct occur is not something the city of Albuquerque can easily do, as thousands of people ride city buses every month and the department seeks to return to pre-pandemic ridership levels. The lack of specifics in the data is something that officials have taken steps toward improving as part of wider public safety pivot that includes forming a permanent transit security force.

On the same night as Muniz Archibeque’s comments, the council accepted a report of such instances that showed a rise in calls for service compared to the same time last year. The reports, which are mandated by ordinance, highlight the number of incidents across the entire ABQ Ride system, which currently includes close to 2,000 bus stops. But they lack specificity, and absent from the reports are data about where the incidents are occurring. It’s a hole that Transit Director Leslie Keener said she plans to fix amid safety concerns from drivers and riders.

“It’s very hard to digest the information that’s there,” Keener told Journal. “And its usefulness isn’t the greatest. I think we have some ability to clean that up.”

What does the data show?

The available data show that calls for service for one of three primary responding agencies — the Metro Security Division, Albuquerque Community Safety and Albuquerque Police Department — have increased by about 53% compared to this time last year. The vast majority of calls for service are APD responding to calls labeled as “onsite suspicious,” which means a calls about a person behaving suspiciously.

The same data show that there has been a steady increase in APD’s response to fire calls, going from three across April, May and June 2024 up to 22 from January to March of this year. They increase in the winter months, a spokesperson said, because more people are starting fires to keep warm.

ACS also performed about twice as many wellness checks, which are calls related to someone who appeared to be physically incapacitated and in need of assistance, from April 2024 to March 2025. Alongside those increases is a growth in “proactive calls,” defined as call-outs where an officer heads to a bus stop, bus station, or other location without someone necessarily reporting an incident.

ABQ Ride also launched the “See Say” app in October 2024, which provides riders with a discreet way to report issues, which are sent directly to a dispatch office at the Alvarado Transportation Center.

Most incidents are occurring at bus stops, the data showed. However, it could not pinpoint at which of Albuquerque’s 1,800 in-service bus stops the incidents were occurring.

Of the three responding agencies that report ABQ Ride issues, only Metro Security’s response indicates the location from which calls originate.

There are some route-specific data contained in a 2024 report titled “Albuquerque Long-Range Transit Security Plan.” That data showed that routes along the Central corridor have about eight times more incidents compared to routes along Coors, San Mateo, Wyoming and Montgomery.

However, the three responding agencies, each with different objectives, make it challenging to have consistently available uniform data, Keener said. To address this issue, ABQ Ride plans to hire a data analyst position in the coming weeks.

Safety priority means more APD reliance

The lack of data and increased reporting represent an awkward in-between phase, transitioning from the current approach to something new, Keener said.

“I think zero fares helped us to start looking at (safety) from a different level, and collecting more and collecting better data to be able to make and drive some of these decisions. But we’ve still got some work to do on it,” Keener said. The city began a zero fares pilot program in January 2022 to see how eliminating fares for buses would affect the service. With the help of federal grants, the pilot program was extended before fares were permanently eliminated in 2023.

Moving forward and set forth in the Albuquerque Long-Range Transit Security Plan, ABQ Ride is looking to form a security division to oversee a cadre of public safety positions and increase integration with APD. The Transit Safety Officers (TSO) will make up the bulk of that force

TSOs are police service aides (PSAs) who undergo the same training but specialize in supporting transit operations, according to APD Cmdr. Gerard Bartlett. They enforce ABQ Ride’s “Rules to Ride,” a conduct code that riders must adhere to when using transit facilities.

“We have had multiple PSAs become TSOs, and we have had some TSOs who are applying for sworn (officer) positions,” Bartlett said.

An ABQ Ride spokesperson confirmed that there are currently 18 TSOs. Over the next few years, Keener said they plan to have 87. As the TSO totals increase, ABQ Ride will rely less on Metro Security, which has numerous other responsibilities, and more on a transit-focused security force supported by the APD.

It’s a far cry from the way things used to be, Bartlett said.

“When I was a patrolman, we didn’t have communication,” Bartlett said, referring to the link between transit operations and APD. “(Now) our transit safety officers and our transit safety PSAs are embedded within the police department, and so they’re all on the same radio frequency, so we have direct lines of communication to our sworn law enforcement component to better our response times.”

For now, TSOs primarily operate out of the Alvarado Transportation Center and respond to transit areas elsewhere when possible. But in the future, Keener said TSOs will be ABQ Ride’s primary security force.

Bartlett said the final expression of ABQ Ride will always be something that’s being tweaked and adjusted to meet the needs of the present moment. But guiding that final vision is the idea of balance between “a hard stance” on enforcing the rules to ride and a point of view that appreciates the multitude of people riding the bus.

“Transportation is a real social vulnerability for folks in Albuquerque,” Bartlett said. “And so we’re grateful for the opportunity to do this.”