By
Tom McKay
This
City's Police Kill More People Than the NYPD — And That's Just the Start of the
Story Image Credit: AP
On
Sunday, March 16, 38-year-old mentally ill homeless man James Boyd turned his
back to Albuquerque police officers after a tense standoff and was shot dead.
Captured by a video camera mounted on one of the responding officer's heads,
the grisly clip depicts what appears to be the shocking overuse of force by
Albuquerque's finest.
Warning:
The clip below shows the violent death of a person by firearm.
The
city claims the officers acted in justifiable self-defense. But to outside
observers, it looks a lot more like brutality — an utterly unnecessary
escalation of force at best and an extra-judicial execution at worst.
But
wait, there's more: A single video only tells us so much, and what might
ultimately be more damning are statistics that show Albuquerque police officers
constantly feel they need to use their guns. The latest shooting is just one
part of a deadly pattern. The APD routinely kills more suspects per capita than
the NYPD, which serves a metro area 16 times the size of Albuquerque and has
34,000 officers to the APD's 1,000. Since 2010, the APD has been involved in 37
shootings in which 23 people died. Between 2010 and March 2012, the APD was
involved in 18 fatal shootings to the NYPD's 22 in the same time period. No
officer involved in any of the cases has been prosecuted or even fired, despite
a body trail that suggests a department with wildly inappropriate use-of-force.
Even
more grotesquely, in 2012 the New York Times reported $500 payments are issued
to officers put on paid leave following shooting incidents to cover their
stress-related expenses. This was called a de facto "bounty system"
by families of the APD's victims.
The
Albuquerque Journal has found that APD misconduct has resulted in $24 million
in judgments against the city in lawsuits since 2010, a number that seems
likely to increase as more suits get resolved and new ones are filed over
disputed cases. And the feds are concerned as well. The U.S. Justice Department
has been looking into the APD's alleged civil rights violations and excessive
use of force for over a year, though it has yet to announce any findings.
Unrest:
Demonstrators took to the streets last Tuesday, and on Sunday, protests across
the city led to a violent crackdown by the APD. Local filmmaker Jesse Darling
told VICE News, "The crowd was generally pretty peaceful and there wasn't
too much aggression until a bit later in the evening. Then it turned into more
kind of an Occupy crowd, and that's when police started throwing tear gas
canisters."
Local
novelist Frances Madeson claims, "New Mexico is a small state and the
police culture here seems to be growing more paramilitary in nature.
Increasingly you see people who defy the police as power figures and are being
hurt badly."
"We
want our cops to be heroes, and right now, we are terrified of them," one
protester said. "We are afraid to ask for help, lest we reach for our
cellphones or scratch our chins and be murdered. It is a true fear."
