EDITORIAL: Shooting incident involving police chief another wake-up call for state leaders

Last summer, Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen and his family were shopping at a Westside sporting goods store when the first-year sheriff spotted three people stuffing sneakers and other merchandise into duffel bags.

Clad in a white tee and basketball shorts, the top county cop said he told the 23-year-old suspect to put the merchandise back. A verbal dispute ensued. Allen and an off-duty deputy physically detained the suspect, who reportedly struck the sheriff twice during the July 29 incident.

The shoplifting suspect had been arrested more than a dozen times since 2018 on repeated drug-related charges.

“I witnessed some retail crime going on in the area of (Ellison Drive and Coors Bypass NW). And as the sheriff for Bernalillo County, I’m not going to stand there and just watch crime happen in front of me,” Allen, who created a special unit in March to combat shoplifting, explained to KOAT-TV at the time. “So, whether people agree with how I did it or not, honestly, I don’t care because crime is huge, and it’s rampant running in this county.”

At the time, we told the sheriff we agreed with his intervention, and added “nice work” sheriff.

On Saturday morning, on the way to a news conference outside a notorious convenience store at Central and Pennsylvania, one of the other top cops in Bernalillo County found himself in the midst of a crime.

Driving an unmarked APD truck with his wife a passenger, Police Chief Harold Medina was stopped at the intersection of Central and Alvarado waiting to make a left turn when at least one gunshot was fired toward his truck. The police chief made the split-second decision to avoid the gunfire coming from the northwest corner of the intersection, ignore the red light and accelerate into the intersection, where he crashed into the driver’s side of classic Mustang that was headed east on Central.

Fortunately, Medina and his wife were not injured. The driver of the Mustang, however, was taken to a hospital in critical condition.

APD made the unusual statement that the driver was “expected to make a full recovery,” rather than sticking to the usual police lexicon of critical/serious/stable medical condition. The injured driver’s status has since been upgraded to stable.

We do not fault Chief Medina for trying to protect himself and his family. Many of us would have done the same thing: duck and run. When a family member is in a police vehicle, for whatever reason, we don’t expect police to engage.

Nobody was injured by the gunfire near a homeless encampment on Alvarado, north of Central, which prompted Chief Medina to pull over in the first place and request that officers remove the encampment. Police said a fight broke out between two men on the sidewalk near Medina’s truck, and one of the men pulled out a gun and fired at least once at the other man.

Medina took a breathalyzer and drug test after the crash, as he should have done, to allay any concerns. And the superintendent of police reform has opened an internal affairs review because Medina did not turn on his lapel camera during the incident.

While a possible policy violation, we’re cutting the chief some slack on that, too. His wife was seated in the passenger seat of his truck as gunfire erupted and reported seeing the muzzle of the gun pointed at them. So it’s understandable if the chief was a little distraught and forgot to turn on his lapel camera in a timely manner.

Medina later checked on the other driver and used his radio to call for an ambulance, so he did what could reasonably be expected of an officer driving with his wife through gunfire.

The incidents involving Sheriff Allen and Police Chief Medina encapsulate what is so wrong with Albuquerque: rampant shoplifting, unstable and drug-addicted homeless people wandering the streets, and random gunfire.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have often heard Mayor Tim Keller and Chief Medina say crime is bad across the nation.

Yes, it is, even in Southeast Albuquerque on a sunny Saturday morning. Now that that’s been established, we don’t want to hear “it’s bad everywhere” anymore. We all know that.

The question for city leaders, and state leaders, is what are they going to do about it?

The governor should sign into law Senate Bill 96 increasing prison time for attempted murder, and SB 271 requiring felons arrested for another felony while on pretrial release to stay behind bars. She should sign into law House Bill 236 allowing certain public safety retirees to return to work without harming their pensions, and SB 175 appropriating funds to recruit and train law enforcement officers. And she should veto HB 129 that would impose a seven-day waiting period for gun purchases and SB 5 banning firearms near polling sites.

Legislative efforts at banning firearms near polling sites and executive orders banning firearms in parks and playgrounds are not solutions to violent crime. We need more than window-dressing and virtue-signaling. We need real results.

Without them, state and city leaders should expect more families to stay home and safe, even on a seemingly lazy Saturday morning.