Albuquerque City Councilor Louie Sanchez last year asked the state’s Law Enforcement Certification Board to investigate Albuquerque Police Department Chief Harold Medina after he crashed his truck and failed to turn on his body camera. Almost six months later, Sanchez said he has not received an update.
Sanchez sent a letter to the board’s Chief Executive Officer Joshua Calder on Tuesday requesting an update on the issue “that holds considerable significance for our community.”
“Given the current climate of public trust towards the Albuquerque Police Department, especially in light of the ongoing and ever spreading DWI scandal, I would expect that a complaint of this nature would be treated as a priority by the [board] rather than subjected to the influence of partisan politics,” Sanchez wrote.
Calder acknowledged to City Desk ABQ that “it’s a bit of a slow process,” but that the board is processing “Medina’s misconduct, as we do with every other office.”
“I get that it’s the chief, so probably a little more attention there,” Calder said. “But we’re doing just like we do with every officer that is submitted for misconduct.”
Sanchez filed a complaint, known as an LEA-90, in August with the Law Enforcement Certification Board, which is in charge of suspending or revoking an officer’s law enforcement certification. Sanchez alleges Medina failed to comply with state law when the chief “drove carelessly and crashed into a citizen and deliberately chose not to activate his (on body recording device) video camera.”
Read more about the complaint and the crash here.
Sanchez included a “flow chart” of the board’s misconduct process in his most recent letter and asked whether it accurately depicts the board’s standard operating procedures. If that is the case, he wrote, the board should have already made a decision “regarding disciplinary action.”
While it is rare for an LEA-90 to come from a source other than a law enforcement agency that employs an officer, it can happen. Sonya Chavez, the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy director, told City Desk ABQ in August that the reports are “treated in the same way” and go through the same review process and “scrutiny.”
“I know that while LEA-90s are generally submitted by a given employer or former employer as related to the subject officer, the submission of such complaints concerning officer misconduct is not limited to those employing entities and such practices have long been the standard of the LEA since the mid-2000s,” Sanchez wrote.
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