Albuquerque's war on its own people

Hellava job, Mayor Berry. “APD has done an exceptional job this afternoon of deescalating situations when we have protesters who obviously are in a situation where they want to escalate the situation on numerous occasions,” said  Mayor Richard Berry while neglecting to mention that his police department was the cause of the demonstration. About 1,000 protestors took to the street Sunday over the shooting of an unarmed homeless man with a history of mental illness. The Albuquerque Police Department has fatally shot 23 men since 2010 resulting in $24 million paid out to settle wrongful death lawsuits.
Included in the $24 million figure is a $7.95 million settlement with the family of Iraq War veteran Kenneth Ellis III, who was fatally shot in the neck by APD officer Brett Lampiris-Tremba while holding a gun to his own head. The settlement came after a jury awarded $10.3 million to the the family and the city appealed. The judgment was one of the largest against the city in its history. In another case the city paid out $900,000 to settle a death where the victim was armed only with a plastic spoon. Then there was the matter of a secret arrest that cost the city $150,000. Police took a woman and her two adult sons into custody and took them not to jail but to a city park to better interrogate without being inundated by excessive paperwork.
Only 36% of the population trusts the police and the mayor dotes on this flagrant failure of civil society as "an exceptional job". What does he think a fuck up is?



The City of Albuquerque seems to treat its police department as some sort of self governing entity beyond its control. The original Mayor Richard Daley would have been sickened to think that a majority of the population of Chicago did not trust his police force. Mayor Rudy Giuliani would have kept two lines of polices captains, one coming and one going, outside his office if he thought the majority of the population had lost faith in his police.
 


Does anyone think Police Chief Gordon Eden would have kept his job in a Giuliani administration after he ruled this act of wanton homicide justified?