Nineteen police officers in Albuquerque, New Mexico, quit the police department’s specialized protest team after an officer was put on leave following a protest.
“They don’t feel supported here, and they don’t feel trust. They feel second-guessed, and they don’t feel that they can do their job, no matter how perfect they do their job, without getting in trouble,” Shaun Willoughby, the president of the Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association, told KOB4.
The Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association’s president warned that the officers don’t feel supported by the police department.
“I think Mayor Keller needs to make a serious decision of what this police department’s priority structure is,” Willoughby said. “Morale, let’s not even talk about it because it doesn’t exist. There is no morale. Your Albuquerque police officers are absolutely miserable at work— nobody’s happy.”
The spate of resignations came after a fellow emergency response team officer was put on leave after following a counterprotest to a Proud Boys rally that never occurred. Deyontae Williams, who police say was armed with a rifle, was detained by police and escorted away from the demonstration.
The APD said there was a “breakdown in the chain of command” about whether Williams should be charged with a crime, and the officer was placed on leave while officials investigated the incident.
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“Chief Medina made it clear that we cannot have a breakdown in communication during critical incidents,” the APD said of the incident. “We have worked hard to earn back the public’s trust. We will lose that trust if we resist accountability and culture change.”
Williams told a local news station Monday that he hadn’t been charged with a crime. Yet, the APD said that Williams had been charged with child endangerment but had not received a summons in the mail.
The officers who resigned from the team included one lieutenant, two sergeants, and 17 officers, but a spokesperson for the APD emphasized that the resignations would not damage the department’s ability to conduct effective crowd control operations.
None of the officers who resigned from the emergency response team resigned from being an officer at the department, but Willoughby said that 20 officers had resigned from the APD in the last two months.
In March, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller appointed interim Chief Harold Medina to be the city’s chief of police and appointed Sylvester Stanley to the newly created position of superintendent of police reform.
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A 2014 Justice Department investigation of the city found that the APD “engages in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force” in violation of federal law. The DOJ found that a majority of the 20 fatal officer-involved shootings between 2009 and 2012 were unconstitutional, and Albuquerque police used less than lethal force in an “unconstitutional manner,” including using Tasers on people who were passively resisting arrest or posed a minimal threat to officers.
The department is now subject to biannual reviews by an independent monitor. The latest review, released last November, said that the APD’s “compliance efforts have exhibited serious shortfalls” and suggested that the department is “on a path that reflects deliberate indifference” to the court-approved settlement agreement between Albuquerque and the Justice Department.
