Violent Crime Surge! What Should Albuquerque Mayor Do?
Let's embrace our democracy, build a better and more inclusive city, state and nation where we aren’t defined by our failure, but rather by our resilience.
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On August 28, 2021, editors at the Albuquerque Journal presented a critical question to New Mexicans. What should the new or existing mayor of Albuquerque do to address the issue of violent crime?
Obviously no city wants to be known for poverty, crime, police brutality, corruption, unemployment, drug addiction, or homelessness. And whether Tim Keller is reëlected or dismissed it's important to understand the underlying causes and contributing factors that have brought us to where we are.
Some will say that criminality's grip on the city is due to failed leadership, a culturally engrained distrust in the establishment, political pandering, ineptitude within law-enforcement, a “broken” justice system, or a correctional department incapable of achieving its mandate. And there is valid evidence to support these arguments. But to really address this issue we need to know how we got here. We need to understand the underlying causes, accept some responsibility, then step into our more rational selves to address them.
We have all seen enough bickering across the political aisle to know that a politician is never going to be a panacea to our problems. It's true that our leaders are politicians, but not all politicians are leaders. A distinction that's important for us to understand as we flex our democratic power with the upcoming votes for mayor, district attorney, attorney general, governor, and state representatives.
Our elected officials and lawmakers labor under the delusion that drafting a bill is the extent of their responsibilities towards their constituents. A piece of paper that says don't do something and essentially they've accomplished their purpose. Theoretically they could draft a bill tomorrow that says No More Crime! then attend a press conference in the afternoon to congratulate themselves on having rescued us from the clutches of depravity. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but this is almost what we've come to expect from our politicians, as Albuquerque Journal reported a few weeks ago:
Republican lawmakers have seen many of their efforts to put tougher laws on the books – from habitual felony offender consideration to use of unlawful weapons while trafficking – hit a political brick wall in Santa Fe, where Democrats hold solid majorities in both houses of the Legislature.
Do Republicans actually believe that crime can be systematically addressed by just drafting more laws? If this is true let's not stop at crime, let’s also end poverty, racism, wrongful convictions, bullying, traffic, cancer, and if there's time COVID-19. We might actually conclude that this is how it works from listening to Senator Mark Moores, R-Albuquerque, when he recently criticized Governor Lujan Grisham's move to send state police officers into Albuquerque to assist with crime surge:
These Democrats, who slander law-enforcement and scoff at our crime bills, are now asking state police officers to again put themselves in harm’s way and crush the criminal insurrection taking place under their watch.
The implication being, if Democrats would have passed these aforementioned crime bills then police officers wouldn't have to expose themselves to danger in their attempt to uphold the law. This is nonsense and the very definition of political pandering. The pen that signs a piece of legislation is not a magic wand, Senator, it's just a pen, and your crime bills are not so different from the types of hysterical legislation signed across this nation in the nineties. Hysteria that gave us private prison profiteers, denied youth offenders a chance at life, mass-incarceration, not to mention all the secondary consequences that have come from turning drug addiction into a crime. If this is the best that you can offer your constituents, Senator, you should resign.
We don't need more crime bills. Unless there's a shortage of toilet paper. But even then we may be better off with tree bark, poison ivy, or handfuls of broken glass.
The problem with so many elected officials is that they've limited their leadership to drafting bills, shifting the blame across the aisle, and pandering to their supporters. They’ve forgotten that true leadership involves stepping into the trenches of the poorest, most violent forgotten parts of any city. Leadership is showing them that you give a damn and that their access to opportunities and success is just as important as anyone else's. Often the most crucial task of any leader is being able to listen to everything being said – and not always with words.
The last forty plus years of our societal evolution as a nation has seen incessant wars against drugs and crime. We’ve devoted trillions to these causes and accomplished less than nothing. We still have crime, poverty, drug addiction, and now we've added mass-incarceration to the caveat of the challenges before us. We have to be careful not to fall back into the clutches of hysteria when politicians tell us that the panacea to our problems is more crime bills. And we need to pay attention to the rhetoric of fear that tends to take hold of many politicians when they run for reëlection, because they fear being perceived as soft on crime.
Something that we've seen recently in New Mexico every time Governor Lujan Grisham touches on the issue:
Repeat violent offenders have no business on our streets, terrorizing workers and families simply trying to live their lives in peace.
Most will agree with this statement. But when we peel back its shiny, politically convenient exterior we find an inconvenient truth. If repeat violent offenders are what we are looking at, then let's take a moment to acknowledge the totality of the issue.
To begin with, someone who repeatedly offends is likely a convicted felon. And a convicted felon is someone who has already passed through the prescribed treatment of incarceration for the stated purpose of rehabilitation.
In the last fiscal year New Mexicans handed over $339 million to the Department of Corrections for the purpose of educating and reforming criminals into rehabilitated citizens. Over the last two decades New Mexicans have invested between $6.6 to $7.0 billion into a correctional department that not only doesn’t rehabilitate criminal offenders, but it's not even structured or staffed to do so. Essentially we are paying to have crime deposited back on our streets. And as I've previously reported, criminality is only being worsened and amplified by the medicine being doled out under cabinet secretary Alisha Tafoya Lucero.
The governor is undoubtedly aware of the contradiction in her assessment. She alone appoints her cabinet secretaries. New Mexico’s high recidivism rates are directly correlated to the issue of repeat violent offenders, and yet nobody is demanding reforms or a change of leadership. In other words, we are lamenting the spilled milk when we’re the ones pouring it into a broken glass.
The DOC, in its current form, is only capable of warehousing and punishing offenders. It’s constitutional mandate is education and reform, but to accomplish the task would require a dismantling of the system as it currently exists. As I previously reported, the Department is plagued with bureaucratic dinosaurs that are simply not qualified to shift their approach from punishment and vengeance to one of genuine interest in seeing broken people reform their lives.
The correctional mindset should be:
Our task is to convert broken individuals, whether that be from addiction, socio-economic neglect, or poor choices into functional, law abiding members of society.
To arrive at this reality requires more from us than just crime bills, finger-pointing and tired rhetoric. Democrats in the legislature have successfully defeated no less than 10 GOP crime measures in the last two years – all aimed at violent criminals. But it's important to note that none of these were crime measures outside of the same, unimaginative panacea of more “crack downs” with harsher prison sentences. They've repackage the medicine so it no longer says uranium, mercury, or lead on the label but it's still poison. Which leads us to expect that if they ever again control both houses of the Legislature the GOP will suspend the Constitution, install an Inquisitioner and bring back public executions. The Governor, for her part, as the Journal reports, is so desperate to appear moderate to voters she distances herself from her Democrat colleagues in the Legislature:
The governor says Democrats in the Legislature have prioritized rehabilitation and reform within the criminal justice system – a laudable goal as long as it doesn't allow repeat violent criminals to remain on the streets. In a statement from her office, a spokesman for the governor wrote fundamental changes are required including the “willpower” of law-enforcement, prosecutors and judges to crack down on violent offenders and drug traffickers.
Governor Lujan Grisham reminds us of the way some politicians talk about renewable energy: a laudable goal to have clean air bio diversity, and a habitable planet but our economy is too delicate right now for these types of commitments. What they are really saying, whether the polemic issue is crime, climate change, education or healthcare is let's just do what we've always done before, we’ll kick the political can down the road to the next administration just like it was kicked to us.
For starters, Governor, I wouldn't go so far as to say “laudable goal” when referring to what your own colleagues in the legislature are after. Because the NM Constitution demands rehabilitation and reform from penitentiaries. That aside, let's look at the issue of repeat offenders a little closer. We begin with someone who commits a crime, society sentences him or her to be rehabilitated at the approximate tax payer expense of $46K per year, the individual then gets out and proceeds to venture further down the rabbit hole of criminality. Our response is to then repeat the same failed treatment.
This is reminiscent of the doctors who used to bleed their patients to treat jock itch or the common cold. Their victims would go pale, become dehydrated and eventually die. The doctors would scratch their heads in befuddlement and then proceed to repeat the same treatment on their next victim. Sending offenders back into the same treatment expecting different results is not only
insane it's counterproductive.
We want people to be responsible for their actions, agreed. But in some ways we’re asking people to be something other than they are without offering them the resources and proper motivation to do so. We “crack down” with police brutality, harsher laws, more draconian sentences, and a correctional department centered on punishment and vengeance and then scratch our heads in disbelief when our efforts fail.
Some believe they shouldn't be penalized for the errant behaviors of others. They say things like, it's not my fault they don't want to follow the law. And, it's not right to make me pay for their choices.
There was a time when I used to repeat the same argument. I would say things like, they're criminals because they're lazy… they want something for nothing and I'm not going to give it to them! But seventeen years in a bathroom-sized box with a variety of individuals has afforded me self-awareness and insight into the failure of our mass-incarceration experiment. And now I say:
It's great that you're educated, hard-working and successful. The American Dream has obviously worked out well for you. But for a lot of people this isn’t the case. The reasons for this are varied and in some instances poor personal choices are certainly a factor. However, part of being a member of society is that we help one another to stay the course. If we don't do this, if we don't start to see others as extensions of ourselves, offering our support and help, then our democracy has failed to live up to our own expectations.
To the politicians who opt for legislation over leadership, the ones who bring nothing more to this discussion than crime bills and “crack downs”, it's time for us to remind them that we've already tried that approach. We've built the prisons; we've installed the spigot on tax payer revenue to fill the coffers of prison profiteers; we've tried exacting vengeance with draconian sentences and executions.
It hasn't worked.
Recidivism rates across the nation are proof of this. We need more than just threats and punishment to defeat criminality, because more guns and more police is not going to do it. And the choice before us is this: Either we follow the evidence and address criminality before it begins – in childhood with education and a societal support structure that turns the American Dream into the American Experience – or we just cross our fingers and hope that criminality doesn't eventually take from us something or someone we love. Either we collectively create a society where there is less need and opportunity to commit crime, or we continue giving sugar pills to terminal patients and hope for a placebo effect.
Yes, in the short term of the election cycles and the 24-hour media fiasco the sugar pill approach is easier, less painful, and cheaper. But it's not sustainable in the same way that fossil fuels are not a sustainable energy source if our intent is to continue on this planet.
The leaders we elect often seem confused as to whether they should lead us towards a better tomorrow or placate us into excepting the status quo as the best we can do. When in all actuality we don't need them to convince us of anything, what we need from them is leadership.
What should the mayor of Albuquerque do?
The wheel of social cohesion, harmony and peace doesn't need to be reinvented. The research has been done, the techniques proven, and the outcomes obvious – if not inevitable. First let's encourage the mayor to stop having circular conversations with DAs, defense attorneys, and police chiefs. All three are reactionary elements not equipped or incentivized to address the underlying causes of criminality.
Next, let's ask our mayor to step into the city’s most challenged communities and ask this very existential question: What needs to happen so that every single one of these kids has the same opportunities for greatness as the kids in the more affluent neighborhoods?
After you have done this, Mr. or Mrs. Mayor, be sincere with the voters and earn their trust. Make transparency a priority for your administration. Focus less on the 24-hour news cycle and more on the long term goals of the city. Prepare the public with the truth: the road ahead is going to be arduous and sacrifices are a must. Explain to them that tragedies are going to happen along the way. People will be killed, guns will sometimes fall into the wrong hands, and misguided individuals will commit atrocities.
In response to the immediacy of crime let's make the city into a place where criminality isn't convenient. We lament that there are drug dealers and violence, yet willingly create the environment for them to exist. Did we learn nothing from Prohibition? The sad truth is we unfortunately live in a nation where people feel compelled to drug themselves. We don't have to like it or agree with it, but we do have to accept this reality as our temporary predicament and address it – not with laws relegating addiction to criminality, but with laws that show we understand the situation.
Legalization of the substances that people will inevitably consume is not capitulation or defeat, it's common sense – like having the courage to end a twenty year war that had long ago lost its objective. Legalization leads to criminal cartel extinction. They exist now because we've made it lucrative for them to exist. By now we should know we can't curb behaviors with laws alone. We couldn't do it with alcohol, cigarettes, sex, food, and drugs are not going to be the exception.
In regards to the guns, it's kind of silly to live in a nation where there are literally more guns than people and then be horrified when one gets taken into a middle school and used to kill. It's like living in a beach house and being shocked and outraged every time you find sand on the floor. For the time being, as a nation, guns aren't going to be outlawed, given the Second Amendment and the clout of the NRA, and the fact that the U.S. is the largest arms trafficker in the world.
What we could do, however, is give people a tangible incentive to not have guns. We simply offer to trade their guns for other things they want and need – a new phone, a laptop, a rent rebate coupon, gift cards, or anything else. Be creative. Assure them that no arrest will be made and no questions will be asked. Then take the weapons, melt them down, and find artists who are able to make something beautiful out of the metal. And maybe a century from now we’ll look at the art and remember how we used to be and no longer are.
The challenges before us as they relate to criminality are socio- economic at their core. We sometimes get distracted by the rhetoric, ideology, and the sensationalization of it all in the media. As politicians fight for relevancy, the rest of us fight for survival. It's easy to look around and feel pessimistic, but despite the challenges and ineptitude of our political process, so divided and cannibalistic, we live in one of the few and fortunate nations were fundamental change is still possible. Let's embrace our democracy, build a better and more inclusive city, state and nation where we aren’t defined by our failure, but rather by our resilience.
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