ABQ police union president makes a compelling case for defunding the department

Fall 2021 election season peaked, then dark-valleyed last week as pundits scurried to draw broader implications from local races. Much of that centered on initiatives spurred by the movement to defund police in favor of funding for public programs for preventing and repairing harms that feed the U.S. prison industry.

A lot of attention fell justifiably on large metro areas like Minneapolis, where 46 percent of voters in the city — site of George Floyd’s killing last summer by a Minneapolis police officer — opted for full-scale remaking of their police department. They were unsuccessful, and the measure didn’t pass.

New Mexico’s local races got less-wide attention, but the incumbent executive of the state’s largest city, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, won re-election by a wide margin despite heavily pro-policing messaging by both right-wing opponents (one of them the county sheriff) and the Albuquerque police union.

Even if votes in favor of the two right-wing, thin-blue-lined mayoral candidates in this race were combined, they wouldn’t have surpassed Keller’s margin of victory. There’s little doubt in my mind that the lived effects of policing in Albuquerque helped form the basis for that outcome. While local police union President Shaun Willoughby falsely insists that New Mexico has been “weak on crime” for decades, residents are keenly aware the department he represents has long carried out some of the nation’s highest rates of police state violence against the very people who pay for their protection. It wasn’t long ago that Albuquerque far surpassed the per capita rate of fatal police shootings in much denser metro areas like New York City.

Read more: https://sourcenm.com/2021/11/09/abq-police-union-president-makes-a-compelling-case-for-defunding-the-department/