Stephen Torres was meeting with a client at his law office, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 12, 2011, when he received a call from a neighbor, who told him that police officers were aiming rifles at his house. He left work and drove to his home, in a middle-class suburb with a view of the mountains. There were more than forty police vehicles on his street. Officers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests had circled his home, a sand-colored two-story house with a pitched tile roof. Two officers were driving a remote-controlled robot, used for discharging bombs, back and forth on the corner.

Stephen’s wife, Renetta, the director of human resources for the county, arrived a few minutes later, just after three o’clock. A colleague had heard her address repeated on the police radio, so her assistant pulled her out of a meeting. When Renetta saw that the street was cordoned off with police tape, she tried to walk to her house, but an officer told her that she couldn’t enter the “kill zone.” “What do you mean ‘kill zone’?” Renetta asked. “Ma’am, you can’t go any further,” the officer said.

Renetta and Stephen found each other at the southern end of the street. There were nearly eighty officers and city officials on the street, many of whom they recognized. Stephen saw a police-union attorney, who defended officers when they were in trouble. Renetta saw the city’s attorney, who worked in the same building and on the same floor as she did, and the deputy chief of police, whom she’d known in graduate school. “I kept looking her way, but she would not make eye contact with me,” Renetta said.

Renetta knew that the only person at home was the youngest of her three boys, Christopher, who was twenty-seven and had schizophrenia. Two hours earlier, he had stopped by her office for lunch, as he did a few times a week. Then he visited an elderly couple who lived two houses away. He said that he needed to “check up on them”; he often cleaned their pool or drove them to the grocery store. Because he found it overwhelming to spend too much time among people, he tried to do small, social errands, so as not to isolate himself.

When Stephen asked the police what had happened to Christopher, he was told only that there was an “ongoing criminal investigation.” Stephen offered to let the officers inside the house, but they refused. Stephen called a close friend on the force, who said that a person had been taken off in an ambulance earlier in the afternoon, at around two o’clock. Stephen called the three main hospitals in Albuquerque, but Christopher hadn’t been admitted to any of them.

Stephen called a neighbor, Val Aubol, who lived across the street, to find out what she could see. Aubol peeked through the shutters of her front window and saw ten officers lined up against a neighbor’s garage, next to the Torreses’ house. TheSWAT team’s Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck was parked in front of them. When Aubol went into her back yard, she saw a rope dangling from her roof. An officer had climbed up and was pointing his gun at the Torreses’ house. Another officer was crouching behind the gate at the side of her house. She told the officers that she’d spoken with Christopher’s father, but an officer waved her back inside. “Stay in the house!” he shouted.

At around five-thirty, a female officer stepped out of a mobile crime unit, an R.V. where detectives processed evidence, and waved the family over. “She was so detached,” Renetta said. “All she said was ‘I regret to inform you that your son is deceased.’ ” She did not tell them how their son had died or where they could find his body. The Torreses asked if they could go home, but the officer said that it was still an active crime scene.

About half an hour later, Val Aubol heard a booming noise, and her ceiling shook. The officer on her roof had shot a flash-bang grenade, which produces a concussive blast of noise and light, onto the Torreses’ front patio. The device temporarily blinds and deafens anyone near it.

It is not clear what the officers thought they were doing at that point. In a report filed later that day, one officer wrote, “Detectives believed another person was inside the house refusing to exit. Supposedly they saw movement in the house.” Another wrote, “There may be three people still inside the residence and all were possibly armed.”

Not long afterward, several officers used a battering ram to open the Torreses’ front door, which had on it a “Welcome” sign decorated with an Easter bunny. The officers searched the laundry room, the basement, the attic, and four bedrooms, dumping the contents of drawers onto the floor. No one was home.

Although there were no suspects to apprehend, the neighborhood was still filled with cops, who had heard on the police radio that an officer had shot someone. According to Thomas Grover, a sergeant with the Albuquerque Police Department, who resigned a few months after Christopher’s death, shootings by officers set off a ritual in the department: other officers quickly reported to the scene. “It was just team spirit, I guess,” he said. “Everyone would say, ‘Oh, there’s a shooting, we got to get there, everyone’s going down there.’ It was a place to be seen.” He said that in the hours after a shooting cops would ask one another, “Was it a bad shoot? Or a good shoot?”

The Torres family learned how Christopher died from watching the news the next day. At a press conference, the department’s chief public-safety officer said that two officers had tried to arrest Christopher at home, but, when he resisted and grabbed a gun from one of them, the officers felt that their lives were in danger. The local television stations ran an unflattering picture of Christopher with his eyes bugged out. One station reported that the “police suspected Torres is responsible for several violent road rage incidents around the city.” The police department said publicly that Christopher had a lengthy criminal history, which was untrue. He’d never been convicted of a crime, though he had been arrested once, for public affray, disorderly conduct, and impersonating an officer: he’d fought with a man who had illegally carried his gun into a restaurant where Christopher was eating. Christopher told the man that he was a government agent, tackled him, and took the weapon. When asked to show his credentials, Christopher flashed his library card.

In the five years before Christopher’s death, the Albuquerque Police Department shot thirty-eight people, killing nineteen of them. More than half were mentally ill. In Albuquerque, a city of five hundred and fifty thousand, the rate of fatal shootings by police is eight times that of New York City. Renetta vaguely remembered hearing about many of the deaths in the local media. Nearly every time, the police announced that the person who had been shot was violent, a career criminal, or mentally ill. “I just assumed that these men must have done something to merit being killed,” she said. “On the news, they relayed these really sinister stories about the men, and they’d flash these horrible pictures. They looked frightening.”

Grover, the former sergeant, said that when officers shot someone the department typically ordered a “red file” on the deceased. “The special-investigations division did a complete background on the person and came up with any intelligence to identify that, you know, twenty years ago, maybe, the person got tagged for shoplifting,” he said. “Then they gave the red file to the chief.”

More than a thousand people attended Christopher’s funeral, at the Catholic church where he prayed with his parents every week. Stephen, in his eulogy, said that he considered the chief of police, Raymond Schultz, his friend. The Torreses’ sons used to play soccer at the same neighborhood club as Schultz’s children; after the kids’ games, the fathers would play. “I called Ray’s office and conveyed a personal invitation for him to join us this evening,” Stephen said. “I promised him that he would be treated with all due courtesy and respect. If he’s not here, then I ask those police officers who are here, who are some of my dearest friends . . . please convey the following message to him.”

Stephen said that his son’s shooting resembled that of many young men in Albuquerque who were mentally ill and had been killed by police. He begged the chief and the mayor, who worked in Renetta’s building, to meet with him to discuss what had gone wrong. “My wife and I extend our hands to you, Mr. Mayor, and to you, Chief Schultz,” he said. “Please don’t reject our offers.” Schultz was not there. He and Stephen never spoke again.

Christopher had been an easygoing, athletic child, but when he was nineteen he grew more private and sensitive. He was reluctant to leave the house and, eventually, to emerge from his room. He often seemed distracted, as if he were listening to something. A voice kept saying to him, “Well, Chris, I’m here, so let’s get moving.” He wondered if Jesus was talking to him, but he also doubted it. “He felt like maybe he was coming under a depression,” Renetta told me. “He had a great sense of humor that seemed to have been dulled.”

After Christopher received a diagnosis of schizophrenia, in the winter of 2003, his older brother Daniel, who was twenty-four and worked at an auto shop, quit his job and moved home to take care of him. For two years, he tried to make Christopher’s days placid and predictable. Like many people with schizophrenia, Christopher had a low tolerance for abrupt movements or loud noises. When the family watched television or listened to music, they kept the volume low. If they argued, they did so quietly.

It took Christopher two years to adjust to the antipsychotic medications that were prescribed for him. Eventually, the voices he heard became less compelling, and he began working at a metal-fabrication shop. His boss, George Montez, described him as shy, focussed, and deferential. He said that the only time he saw Christopher agitated was when colleagues bickered. “It was just horsing around, but it upset him,” Montez said.

According to the treatment notes of Christopher’s psychiatrist, Kevin Rexroad, Christopher was amiable and not inclined toward drama. When Rexroad asked how he was feeling, he responded, “I’m O.K. How are you?” Christopher’s most persistent symptom was anxiety, which Rexroad traced in part to grief over the onset of his illness. Christopher felt that he was falling short of his own expectations. A therapist who briefly helped him with anxiety wrote that his goals were to “feel good about self,” be “proud of where I’m going,” and “read a little more.”

Occasionally, when Christopher was under stress, he imagined that he had a wife and children, somewhere in the city, whom he’d abandoned. Renetta reacted calmly and offered to look for them. “We’d get in the car and search for his family,” she said. “Once we’d driven a while, Christopher, by the grace of God, would let go of the idea and feel O.K. and be ready to go home.”

After Christopher had worked at the metal-fabrication shop for a few years, Stephen urged him to take classes at a community college. But the idea of being surrounded by peers who might think that he was odd caused him so much anxiety that he couldn’t sleep. In August, 2010, Renetta e-mailed Rexroad to say that Christopher had been perceiving invisible dangers: when Stephen told him to do a household chore, Christopher reacted as if he’d been threatened. “Given a little bit of time and space he then comes back around,” she wrote. “As you know sometimes we walk a very fragile line and strive not to cause any undue agitation.”

A few months later, in February, 2011, when Christopher was driving, another vehicle pulled in front of him into the left-turn lane. At the red light, Christopher got out and walked to the car in front of him, pounded on the windows, and pulled the driver’s door open. The woman driving the car said that it seemed as if he had mistaken her for someone else. She shut her eyes and prepared to be attacked. When she opened her eyes, Christopher had turned around and clutched his hair, as if he realized what he’d been doing. The woman called 911 and reported the incident to the police. She described Christopher as “psycho” and told the police that if she’d had a gun in her car she would have shot him.

About two months later, C. J. Brown, a thirty-nine-year-old detective, interviewed the driver and then filled out a warrant for Christopher’s arrest. Brown didn’t know that Christopher had a mental illness, even though police records showed that he had stated, during his first arrest, that he had schizophrenia. Brown said, “So basically just—you know, at that point, I had a guy that just had a bad attitude while driving.”

Brown, who is five feet ten, weighs two hundred and twenty pounds, and has short, receding brown hair, had been an officer with the department for four years, since 2007. At the time, the department had been ordered by Mayor Martin Chávez to expand by at least a hundred officers, to bring the total number up to more than a thousand. Chávez had promised to reduce crime and quality-of-life infractions, and he developed a program that allowed officers to use nuisance-abatement laws to evict people from businesses and from homes.

The crime rate had been declining for nearly a decade, but the city still ranked in the top fifteen per cent in the country. To recruit new officers, the department advertised on billboards throughout the East Coast and the Midwest. In 2007, the department installed a twenty-five-foot billboard on a wall in downtown Manhattan: it featured a panorama of the Albuquerque skyline and promised a five-thousand-dollar hiring bonus, retirement after twenty years, a “take home car and more.”

Nevertheless, the department struggled to find qualified officers. “We took a beating from the city council,” Schultz, the chief of police, told me. “They berated us. They kept saying, ‘We’ve given you the money—how come you don’t have those numbers?’ ”

The department accepted officers from other police forces, even if they had been disciplined or fired, and it sometimes waived the psychological exam. Steve Tate, the director of training at the Albuquerque Police Academy, said that, after the hiring push, he noticed new cadets “exhibiting some characteristics that I thought were a little strange.” “They were not in charge of their emotions,” he told me. “People were breaking down into tears.” He spoke with the head of the department’s psychological unit, and asked why so many officers seemed psychologically unstable. “I could pick up a sense of worry from her,” he said. “She described to me feeling as though they were strong-armed into seating people that they didn’t feel were ready.” Peter DiVasto, a contract psychologist for the department, said in a deposition that psychologists felt that they were supposed to “err on the side of acceptance.” He testified that “deputy chiefs had been threatened with firing unless those numbers went up.”

At meetings with the police chief and his deputies, Tate said he pleaded to reject applicants who seemed erratic. He said that a “common phrase was ‘Well, we got seats open, so let’s give them a try.’ ” The department began accepting candidates whose “backgrounds were so bad it was just, like, wow,” he said. There were cadets who had admitted to crimes and had been repeatedly disciplined in previous jobs. Of the sixty-three officers who joined the Albuquerque police force in 2007, ten eventually shot people.

Brown had already been rejected by the Albuquerque Police Department, in 1995, because he had bad credit, which was seen as a sign of recklessness. He ended up in the Roswell Police Department, three hours south of Albuquerque. While he was there, a city councillor brought a civil-rights lawsuit against him—she alleged that he had arrested her for exercising her right to free speech—and five citizens filed complaints. He was accused of injuring a man by throwing him to the ground; of humiliating a mother when arresting her for speeding; and of pointing his gun at someone who got out of his car too slowly. Later, he estimated that he had drawn his gun during a traffic stop on at least ten occasions. In 2005, he applied to work for the police department in Rio Rancho, just north of Albuquerque, but he was rejected for having a bad attitude.

Since the last time he applied to the Albuquerque Police Department, Brown had been in two car accidents and filed for bankruptcy—events that the department typically considered indications of instability—but his second application was accepted, and he was given a signing bonus of five thousand dollars. He didn’t take a psychological exam. His training lasted six weeks.

The day that Christopher was killed, Brown arrived at the Torreses’ house wearing bluejeans, black sunglasses, and a shirt that said “Buell Motorcycles.” He said that he found it easier to approach people when he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He was joined by another officer, Richard Hilger, who wore jeans, an untucked T-shirt, and hiking boots. They rang the doorbell, but no one answered. They could see the living room through the slats of the window blinds; no one appeared to be home. They were about to return to their car when Hilger heard a noise in the back yard. According to statements made later by both officers, they walked toward the fence and Hilger called out Christopher’s name.

“Yeah,” Christopher said, approaching the fence from the other side. He wore plaid pajama pants, a white undershirt, and flip-flops.

“I just want to talk to you real quick,” Hilger said.

“You’re talking to me,” Christopher responded.

“Well, can I talk to you face to face?”

“We’re face to face right now.”

“You have a felony arrest warrant,” Brown said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. You have a felony warrant for your arrest.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Christopher said. “This is my back yard.”

According to Brown, Christopher said that the officers would have to fight if they wanted to arrest him. When Christopher took a step backward, Brown jumped the four-foot fence, breaking part of it, and tackled Christopher. “He went to hit me, I punched him, and then the fight was on,” Brown said. Hilger followed his partner into the back yard by removing a panel of the fence. “I basically bum-rushed them all,” he said.

A twenty-four-year-old neighbor, Christie Apodaca, who lived behind the Torreses, heard someone shouting, “I live here. What are you doing? I live here.” She ran to her fence and looked through a coin-size hole in one of the wooden panels. Christopher had gone to her high school, but she’d only spoken to him once or twice. She saw him on his hands and knees, about twelve feet away from her. One man pressed his weight onto Christopher’s lower body and another punched his right side and his face.

Apodaca ran inside her house to call 911. She told the dispatch operator, “I think the other guys are trying to rob the place.”

“Ma’am, are you on—is this on Sunrose?” the operator asked, naming the street where Christopher lived.

“Huh?”

“Is this on Sunrose?”

“Yes.”

“O.K. Those are officers that are on that scene.”

Outside, Brown and Hilger tried to handcuff Christopher, but he tucked his hands underneath him, and flailed his head and legs. On Hilger’s police radio, which was on for just a few seconds, Christopher can be heard yelling, in a high-pitched voice, “I’m a good guy! This is my house!”

The officers tried to pin Christopher to the ground, but they said that he was somehow able to rip his right arm free and grab Hilger’s gun. They said that he wouldn’t let go, even as they punched him. Brown unholstered his pistol, a nine-millimetre handgun that he’d owned since he was sixteen. He pressed the muzzle against Christopher’s back and pulled the trigger. He didn’t hear any noise, and wondered if the gun had malfunctioned. He squeezed the trigger again. This time Christopher said, “Ow.” Christopher was still trying to get up, so Brown shot him in the back a third time.

Apodaca heard the shots, and went back outside and looked through the same hole in the fence. This time, she saw Christopher lying down, facing the ground. He was handcuffed, but he wasn’t moving. The two men stood next to Christopher’s body, looking down. A few minutes later, Emergency Medical Services arrived. One man picked up Christopher’s legs and another lifted his shoulders, and they carried him out of the back yard.

The day after the shooting, Apodaca went to the office of a lawyer, a family friend, and told him that she had witnessed her neighbor’s death. “The way I saw him treated—I just couldn’t put that together,” she said. While she was there, the lawyer called an officer he knew in the police department, and told him that there was an eyewitness to Christopher Torres’s shooting. For several months, Apodaca waited in vain for someone from the department to call her.

querque lies at the intersection of two interstate highways, one stretching from California to the East Coast and the other from Texas to Wyoming. A local saying is that many citizens, intending to drive from one coast to the other and start a new life, end up living in Albuquerque when they run out of money. A fifth of the residents live below the poverty line, many of them in the southeast part of the city, which is often called the “war zone.” Wealthy residents tend to live in the northeastern corner, at the foot of the Sandia Mountains. The division reflects the social climate throughout the state, which has the widest income gap between rich and poor in the country. Gilbert Najar, the director of the police academy in Silver City, New Mexico, who worked for the Albuquerque Police Department for twenty-five years, told me that the department “did policing one way in the South Valley, where there were a lot of immigrant families and people of lower socioeconomic status, and we knew we could violate their rights. But we did not dare commit those tactics in the affluent neighborhoods, where we knew they would file complaints on us.”

Since 1987, the police department has shot at least a hundred and forty-six people. The shooting of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, looked almost routine to people in Albuquerque. They had seen such incidents many times before. Few people protested, and no one paid much attention. Police violence appeared to be a matter of concern only to Albuquerque’s underclass: those who are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, Native American, or Hispanic and poor. David Correia, a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico, told me, “There’s this myth here of tri-cultural harmony—indigenous people, Mexican-Americans, and Anglos—but this precarious arrangement is built on a long history of violence against Spanish-speaking and indigenous people that still plays out.”

The city has hired a succession of experts, a new research team every few years, to analyze the police department’s use of force, but officials seem to have viewed the act of commissioning a report as a proxy for doing something about the problem. Samuel Walker, an expert in police accountability who was hired in 1996 to co-author one of the reports, after the police killed thirty-two people in ten years, said, “When we gave an oral presentation to the city council, I had a very strong impression that many city-council members were not interested.” He described his conversation with Martin Chávez, the mayor, as one of the most hostile interviews he’s ever conducted. He said that the police chief would not look him in the eyes when he briefed him. One city-council member refused to meet with him or return his calls.

His report highlighted the department’s incompetence in responding to people with mental illnesses. The city lacks a comprehensive mental-health-care system, and cops are often called to assist people in the midst of psychotic episodes. When these people don’t follow the officers’ orders, they are sometimes beaten or shot. Grover, the former sergeant, told me that “there was a running joke within the department: don’t threaten suicide with officers, because they’ll accelerate it.”

Five years after Walker’s report, and fourteen more fatal shootings, another task force concluded that the department needed to create an oversight system in which officers would suffer consequences for abusing their authority. In 2006, after sixteen more deaths, the city hired a team of consultants to do another report, which noted that “many recommendations made in this report are based on issues voiced by the prior consultants that are still valid and should be addressed.”

When Mayor Richard Berry took office, in 2009, his transition team tried to draw his attention to a speech, delivered by an ethics scholar at an international conference for police chiefs, called “How Police Departments Become Corrupt.” The speech described the four stages of dysfunction in a police force. The transition team said that the department appeared to have entered the third: employees abide by the “unwritten rules of internal politics”; leaders are promoted because of their relationships, not their work; and officers “rationalize doing unethical things during conversations with each other.” In its report on the department, the transition team wrote that the department showed at least one sign of having entered the fourth stage, exhibiting a commitment to “keep corruption out of the newspapers at any cost.”

The report contained seven paragraphs about corruption; but, by the time it was submitted to the mayor’s office, in November, 2009, those paragraphs had been deleted. In their place was a discussion of the problem of “serial inebriates,” citizens who drained the department’s resources. Paul Heh, a senior sergeant, presented the original version of the report at a city-council meeting in 2011, but he was told after two minutes that he had exceeded the time limit for speaking, even though he had arranged to speak longer. The city council voted on whether Heh should be permitted to continue his speech, and ruled against him.

Heh worked for the department for twenty-four years, and he said that early in his tenure he noticed that small lapses went unpunished. The department’s rules stated that “personnel will not write a police report of alleged officer misconduct in the line of duty either by citizen request or of their own initiative.” Supervisors were responsible for handling claims of misconduct, a policy that allowed them to screen the account that entered official records. Samson Costales, a retired officer, said, “They tell us that we have to cover for each other, because we are a brotherhood, and brothers in blue don’t like rats,” a mentality that he said he learned from his training officers. “You don’t challenge another officer; you don’t testify against him—you lie if you have to. The code existed long before I was a police officer, and I can’t see it ever going away.”

Link:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/son-deceased?intcid=mod-most-popular