'The nerve center': Inside the security hub watching out for APS students

When 13-year-old Bennie Hargrove was shot and killed at Washington Middle School on the third day of school in 2021, Albuquerque Public Schools police were already on campus and responded immediately.

But in the direct aftermath of the shooting, which investigators later said was committed by another eighth-grader who’d brought his father’s gun from home, law enforcement needed to make sure there wasn’t another shooter at the school.

So district police used a relatively new system, designed to access technology built into every school and managed at a command center miles away, to remotely help check the school grounds, send the entire campus into lockdown and alert officers to rush to the school.

“This is the nerve center,” Capital Master Plan Executive Director Kizito Wijenje told the Journal during a tour of the roughly $4.3 million command center, completed in 2020 and funded largely by local mill levy dollars.

Whether an alarm is tripped after hours, or someone swipes a badge when they shouldn’t be at school, or a teacher sounds the alarm with one of the new lanyard cards the district aims to implement in all schools this year that are designed to summon responders in an emergency, the APS command center knows about it.

And that intel comes in real time. For example, if there’s an intruder in a school, authorities at the command center can track their movements and, monitoring from live feeds of school cameras, help police pinpoint exactly where they are as they move throughout the building at any time.

The star of the show is the APS dispatch center, a dark room lit by colorful strip lights, dozens of computer monitors and a wall of about a half-dozen more screens displaying live feeds cutting from different cameras throughout the district’s schools and other buildings.

That dispatch center is manned across multiple shifts shared by eight dispatchers, Dispatch Supervisor Shashanna Gonzalez said, and there’s never a lull in APS keeping tabs on its schools and buildings.

“Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving — you name it, somebody has to be here,” APS Chief of Police Steve Gallegos said.

In district sites like bus stations, APS also sometimes employs radar systems that detect motion when there shouldn’t be any to help keep people from stealing expensive property.

“We wouldn’t be able to do it without this command center,” Wijenje said. “We have to have one nerve center that can, at the press of a button: give access to SWAT; give access to the superintendent and the leadership; and keep the parents of this district knowing … we’re doing the most that we can do with the resources we have.”

The command center also serves as a headquarters for APS police to brief and temporarily store evidence, Gallegos said.

And in the event of an emergency, Albuquerque police can also remotely access APS cameras, although there have been some technical glitches with that. But for the most part, Alarm, Radio and Surveillance Supervisor Michael O’Connor said, those kinks have been worked out.

On top of just adding layer upon layer of safeguards in case of an emergency, Gallegos said the system has also cut down on vandalism and theft in schools or other district sites — to include helping prevent thieves from cutting catalytic converters off APS buses, which Wijenje noted can create about $25,000 in costs for replacing the part and repairing the damage.

The center’s also handy in the mundane, day-to-day operations of the state’s largest district. For example, when a pipe bursts and leaks water in a school, the motion detection systems that feed into the center help the district find out more quickly than in years past, when in the past a burst pipe could have wreaked hundreds of thousands of dollars of havoc over a long break before school staff came back and discovered the issue.

“We’ve had officers respond to schools in December and January, and there’s busted pipes and water flowing. And that’s how we get the notification to get the plumbers out there to … minimize, as much as we can, the damage,” Gallegos said.

Of course, no system is without its flaws, and right now, manpower is among APS police’s biggest.

To cover more than 140 schools, there are currently about 50 officers in the APS police department — leaving almost a dozen vacancies, district spokesman Martin Salazar said. There are even fewer campus security aides, around 56.

Because district police are short-staffed, Gallegos said APS has “really relied heavily on technology,” which according to Wijenje in recent years has amounted to at least $12 million districtwide for cameras, alarms and card access systems.

Wijenje did note that those camera and other monitoring systems are not for surveilling students and staff as they go about their days, but rather for “life, health and safety, and also for tangible safety of equipment and facilities that are taxpayer paid.”

But that’s not to say the district isn’t always watching.

“We want the bad guys to know that — you’re taking (your) chances,” Gallegos said.