Department of Justice moves to end 10-year federal reform effort with Albuquerque police

A decade after the U.S. Department of Justice found Albuquerque police engaged in a “pattern or practice” of using excessive force — as high-profile police shootings mounted — the government is seeking to dismiss the federally mandated reform effort.

In a motion filed Friday to dismiss the Court-Approved Settlement Agreement (CASA), prosecutors said the Albuquerque Police Department “has become a self-assessing and self-correcting agency.”

“These characteristics have enabled APD to demonstrate sustained and continuing improvement in constitutional policing,” according to the motion filed in U.S. District Court in New Mexico.

APD leadership and Mayor Tim Keller lauded the achievement, while a police union official said DOJ “can’t leave fast enough,” and an advocate bemoaned the dismissal as premature.

The most recent report released by Independent Monitor James Ginger found that the city of Albuquerque was at 99% operational compliance, which tracks whether officers follow policies and are corrected when they don’t.

Ginger found the only remaining requirements, while critical, are under the purview of the city and involve timeliness of investigations by the Civilian Police Oversight Agency. Additionally, the motion states APD has “vastly improved its use of force in a constitutional manner.”

Ginger’s report found APD recorded a 45% drop in annual use-of-force incidents since 2020. Although officers shot, or shot at, a record number of people in recent years, almost all of which were found in policy.

“This consent decree has run its course successfully,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a news release Friday. “... Albuquerque Police operates constitutionally. It is now appropriate to end federal oversight and return full control of local law enforcement to the city.”

The motion to dismiss signified that the DOJ has come to the conclusion that APD met its demands. The department has devoted thousands of man hours and millions of dollars to the CASA process — including $13 million to Ginger’s team — and created entire divisions and rewritten policies to meet hundreds of requirements in the CASA.

Police union President Shaun Willoughby said, “It’s like Christmas morning.”

Willoughby, a regular critic of the reform effort, said the only benefit from the CASA was more emphasis on training, although he didn’t agree with the training or the way it was handled. He blamed the consent decree on the city’s issues with crime and having more police shootings than before the reforms began.

Willoughby added, “This has been a rollercoaster of destruction.”

Peter Cubra, a retired attorney who defended people with disabilities in the reform effort for years, called the DOJ’s decision “horrifically predictable.”

Cubra pointed out the dismissal motion had “zero signature lines” of any DOJ members on the case prior to 2025, including Deputy Chief Paul Killebrew, with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, who spent years with the reform effort.

Cubra believed the termination request was ultimately motivated by the Trump administration, which, according to The Washington Post, has shaken up the division and reassigned DOJ Civil Rights staffers overseeing a variety of cases, including police brutality.

The national DOJ office did not respond to questions on the matter.

Cubra said APD’s “practice of shooting people when they should not is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.” He added, “And the only thing that might influence that would be new litigation brought by people who don’t work for the government and a courageous judge.”

The next hearing on Ginger’s most recent compliance report is scheduled for May 15 in front of U.S. District Judge James Browning. It is unclear if he will take up the motion to dismiss the CASA.

As the department has come closer to this point, Cubra and other advocacy groups have decried spikes in APD police shootings, particularly those involving people in the grips of a behavioral health crisis. Data from 2022 shows that, despite the increase, officers used force in less than 1% of behavioral health and suicide calls, and 3% of those calls violated policy.

APD Chief Harold Medina said the consent decree didn’t fix “the system in its entirety,” referring to resource and continuum lapses in the state’s behavioral health system.

Unlike when the CASA was first entered into, recent years have seen more people armed at the time they were killed by police. In some cases, those killed threatened suicide and told police to shoot them, even pointing cellphones and other objects at officers, as if they were guns, before being shot.

Medina added, “We need places for people to get intervention early, for people to get help early, and it cannot rely on an officer being dispatched to deal with these individuals.” He said he has seen the change in his officers’ behavior in such situations and gives credit to the CASA.

“I remember in 2013, 2012 … we had some horrible shootings … we had a lot of incidents that were just very tough for us to explain,” Medina said. “... I think there’s a vast change in what we’ve done and how we handle situations. I watch videos and I see the patience and the understanding of our officers, and it’s unbelievable how patient and understanding they are today compared to the past.”

A long road

The DOJ began investigating excessive force by APD in November 2012 after the Albuquerque City Council and local advocates requested the federal government look at officers’ use of force, particularly deadly force. Then came the police shootings: the deaths of Kenneth Ellis, which led to an $8 million payout, and James Boyd, a homeless man camping illegally in the foothills. The shooting of Boyd led to protests that saw crowds overturning cars as tear gas wafted in the streets.

In November 2014, two years after the investigation began, the DOJ announced it was signing onto a settlement agreement with the city. Since then, the reform effort has persisted through multiple police chiefs and mayors. And it has not been all smooth sailing.

The department’s recent success followed years of backsliding and, in 2020 and 2021, Ginger blasted APD’s reforms as “on the brink of a catastrophic failure” — citing its inability to police itself.

In July 2021, an external group called the External Force Investigation Team (EFIT) began training the Internal Affairs Force Division to investigate use-of-force cases, making sure they meet deadlines and follow procedures.

The EFIT team has since turned investigations back over to APD, paving the way for it to reach full compliance. The only roadblock remaining is the Civilian Police Oversight Agency (CPOA), which investigates civilian complaints against officers and is not under APD’s control.

In his latest report, Ginger found that CPOA was making progress toward compliance and had developed a “triage protocol” to prioritize cases that were “more likely to have sustained findings.” The executive director of the CPOA could not be reached Friday.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney for New Mexico Ryan Ellison said APD had “made tremendous progress toward constitutional policing and a culture of accountability.”

“This progress builds on nearly a decade of hard work and partnership with the community, laying a strong foundation for the future and opening the door to a new chapter of local control of law enforcement,” he said. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office will stand shoulder to shoulder with the men and women of the APD to make Albuquerque a safer place to live, work, raise a family, and run a business.”

Medina, who has waffled on his possible retirement in the coming year, said he believes the changes made through the CASA will stand the test of time.

“There’s going to be some fine-tuning and some streamlining of the processes, but the fundamentals of this settlement agreement are what every department should strive for: constitutionally policing the community and holding people accountable and making sure force is only used when it has to be used,” he said. “So I just want to make sure that we don’t start messaging that the intent is, ‘We’re going to go back to the way it was.’ That’s not the right message.”