Chief Medina leaving APD better than he found it

After innumerable TV appearances at crime scenes over the past five-plus years, Harold Medina has one of the most recognizable faces in New Mexico. He says if someone in the hinterlands doesn't initially recognize him on sight, they do when they hear his distinctive voice.

Medina didn't get famous with political campaigns, personal injury commercials or a Netflix series. He became so as the frontman of the Albuquerque Police Department, and at times the scapegoat of its shortcomings.

Medina is leaving APD at the end of the year after more than five years as interim and then officially police chief. And like a responsible camper, he's leaving the grounds in better shape than he found them.

Despite all the carping Medina endured over a bad traffic accident on East Central in February 2024, and the drama surrounding his appointment as interim police chief in September 2020 following the ousting of former Police Chief Michael Geier during a rendezvous with Mayor Tim Keller at a small neighborhood park on Labor Day, Medina should be considered among the most impactful police chiefs APD has had. Please allow me to make my case.

I met with Medina at his office Wednesday to lunch and chat. It was a busy day for him, he had announced his retirement earlier in the day and had begun boxing things up.

Something he said midway through our hour-and-a-half meeting caught my ear and resonated with me. Medina said people have had a tendency to underestimate him throughout his 30-year law enforcement career, giving him some unseen advantages over his peers. I can relate to that.

Nothing motivates some people more than when others underestimate them. That used to motivate the hell out of me in boot camp 40 years ago: The other guy holding pugil sticks never saw it coming until I whopped him in the helmet and pushed his stunned body into the drink. Oorah those 1-on-1 pugil-stick battles in the pebbled sands of Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. If you can knock a fellow private off the plank and into the cement pond — the drink — with everyone in your platoon screaming "Kill him," "Finish him off," you feel like John Wayne for 10 minutes or so.

But enough about my pugil-stick battles of 1985, and back to Medina.

My point is underestimating people like Medina gives them the fight in their bellies to prove their critics and opponents wrong. APD needed some gusto and self-confidence after the city entered into a court-approved settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014, which determined officers had displayed a pattern of excessive force. Medina brought back the agency's pride.

APD was in a really bad place five years ago. Lest we forget the state's largest law enforcement agency was in the crosshairs of destructive antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters just a few years ago.

What has Medina done? Well, for openers, he embraced reforms of an over-aggressive police force rather than fighting them. APD is one of a handful of police agencies to get out from under DOJ oversight and to move forward on its own accord. That's a good thing for people like me who want local control and accountability of police.

Medina has, even more importantly, boosted morale in APD. Officers aren't patrolling the mean streets of Albuquerque with their tails tucked between their legs like they were five years ago, when public sentiment toward APD was not good. 

Today's officers know they're under constant scrutiny with cellphones in everyone's pockets and bodycams on officers, which Medina supported while the former sheriff did not. As he points out, the body-worn cameras and de-escalation training have made them better and more professional officers than the Starsky and Hutches of 50 years ago.

I imagine we'd all behave a little bit better at work if we had to wear bodycams that our supervisors could review. I'd have to cut out at least half my jokes and smoke breaks, hitherto guised as "traffic and weather checks." I do stay on top of things going on outdoors, though.

What else? As reluctant as I am to admit it as a city resident myself, crime is dropping in Albuquerque. Homicides are down, auto thefts are down, pretty much all crime is down. That's great and all, but we can't forget we've been one of the most dangerous cities in the nation in recent years in terms of violent and property crimes. 

The next police chief must build on that positive momentum. It's no time to go soft on crime in the state's largest city, which was released from six months of National Guard protection last week after the governor declared a public safety emergency in Albuquerque in April.

Medina told me Wednesday he anticipates APD reaching its elusive 1,000-officer goal in March. Improved morale has no doubt been a factor in APD finally reaching the full force budgeted by the City Council. The city hasn't has a thousand sworn officers since 2011. We may not be able to arrest, convict and incarcerate our way out of crime, but we sure can try. The Untouchables didn't send social workers to reason with Al Capone at his Chicago hotel where he ran his criminal empire.

In addition to the officer growth, the productive police service aide program has more than doubled in size in recent years. Rain, sleet or snow, those unarmed police aides keep the city moving. We can't get enough of those young men and women, both as potential recruits and public servants today. That's an action-packed job that's no small deal to those involved in an accident.

So how should we grade a police chief? Statistics? No, they're just data that can be twisted to undergird any contention. Staffing levels and morale? Oh yes, uniformed officers in public view and who are willing to run toward the gunfire matter a great deal indeed. A general sense of safety in the city that attracts new residents, new businesses and investments, and doesn't make people afraid to go out at night? Definitely.

It's going to be up to the next police chief, and the third term of Keller, to keep the momentum of reform, accountability and enhanced public safety moving in the right directions.

Medina's retirement, and the recent and ongoing retirements of about a half dozen APD leaders who were key to implementing reforms, is going to leave a big hole in the reform movement that the next police chief is going to have to fill. Medina told me he's willing to offer some advice after a little fly-fishing near Taos. Keller and the next police chief shouldn't be hesitant to call him.

Medina has proven his initial, and ongoing critics, wrong. He's leaving APD on his own terms as a successful police chief who brought the agency out of a deep abyss. That's no small accomplishment — much bigger than my puggle-stick fights.

I wish Medina well in his retirement and thank him personally for his service to the city as a resident myself. "Well done, Harold," I say. "And don't say anything out loud in the grocery store line in Taos if you don't want to be recognized."

Jeff Tucker is a former Opinion editor of the Albuquerque Journal and a member of the Journal Editorial Board. He may be emailed at jtucker@abqjournal.com.