It was widely known that many people in the department were having extramarital affairs with other officers. “These guys would pass these female officers from one to another,” Heh said. “It all grew from there.” Cassandra Morrison, a sergeant who retired in 2013, described the department as an “old-boys’ club,” where certain men became untouchable. “As women, we were thought of as a subculture,” she said. “If you wanted to move up, you had to kiss somebody’s ass, rub somebody’s elbow, take somebody out to dinner, or have sex with somebody.” The social hierarchy in the department rewarded an exaggerated masculine ethos, which Schultz seemed to encourage. When asked by a local reporter about extramarital affairs within the department, he pointed out that his officers were young, attractive, and in good shape. “There’s nature at play,” he explained.

In the legal-training materials distributed to officers, the lesson on strip searches featured a cartoon of five male officers staring through the window at a silhouette of a naked woman—with a shapely butt and enormous breasts, which she is fondling—the object of their search. The lesson on arresting prostitutes showed a drawing of a hairy transvestite with a single breast, which droops to her potbelly. “How d’ya know I ain’t jus another purty face out shoppin’ fer my family?” she asks the officer who has come to arrest her.

Morrison said that officers were socialized to be cynical about civilians. “We’re taught to almost dehumanize them,” she said. “It just got to the point where it’s, like, they’re a piece of shit. We don’t care if they raped a baby or were speeding in traffic—everybody’s a piece of shit.” Early in her career, she was often injured, because she fought with people while arresting them. Then she took a forty-hour course offered by the department in crisis-intervention training, a model used by many police departments to help officers communicate with suspects, particularly those who are mentally ill. She never got injured on duty again. She became a senior instructor in the class, but it was held in low regard by many of her colleagues. By 2007, fewer than thirty officers were taking the course each year.

The Albuquerque Police Department acquired weapons and resources from both the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department, which lends police departments surplus military gear. Until recently, officers were also permitted to come to work with guns that they had bought themselves. For some, the weapons functioned as status symbols; expensive, military-style ones were valued highly. Najar, the police-academy director, said that the leaders of the Albuquerque police force, like those of many departments around the country, stated publicly that they subscribed to the theories of community policing, a model that encourages officers to embed themselves in the communities they serve, but that those ideals never permeated the culture of the department. The people the cops arrested were usually strangers. Officers approached them with “all their fears and biases and prejudices,” he said.

Two and a half months after Christopher’s death, Stephen Torres wrote to Mayor Berry, alerting him that another unarmed man had just been killed by police. An officer hired the same year as Brown had shot a twenty-two-year-old man who appeared to be in the midst of a mental breakdown. The officer, Sean Wallace, thought that the man was holding a gun. It turned out to be a spoon. Shortly after the shooting, Wallace received five hundred dollars from the Albuquerque police union, which routinely gave money to officers to help them “decompress” after a shooting, according to a statement issued by the union’s president and vice-president. Wallace had already shot two other unarmed men, killing one of them. He has since received a department award for outstanding service.

Stephen told the Mayor, “I trust that you agree with us that we do have a problem.” He noted that he still had not heard from Schultz or anyone in the police department. “May we please hear from you?” he wrote. A few months later, when Schultz’s mother died, Stephen wrote him a sympathy card. “I was still thinking maybe we would work on this together,” Stephen told me.

One of Renetta’s friends, Jewel Hall, the president of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center, which promotes diversity and human rights in Albuquerque, met with Mayor Berry in July, 2011, and asked him to join her and other activists in inviting the U.S. Justice Department to investigate civil-rights violations by the police department. She believed that the shootings reflected an “élite attitude toward certain neighborhoods and certain citizens.” She added, “Their lives are not valued by those in charge.” The meeting was brief. Berry told her he thought that Albuquerque’s police force was one of the finest in the country. (Later, when the city council passed a resolution requesting that the Justice Department investigate the police force, Berry vetoed the measure.)

Renetta worked in the same building as Berry, and when they ended up in the same elevator they would greet each other awkwardly and then look away. When Renetta ran into him or other top city officials, she imagined that they were thinking, There must be some reason that they killed your son. (Berry told me, “We don’t think any less of the Torreses as a family, and I hope they wouldn’t think any less of us, even though this is a tragic situation.”)

Having worked in government for thirty-three years, Renetta said that she didn’t expect the city to respond to her husband’s pleas. “You don’t know these people,” she told him. Stephen worried that Renetta’s cynicism was a symptom of grief. “She worries me,” he said. “She doesn’t think that the city gives a damn.”

Ray Schultz told me he knew that Stephen Torres was waiting for him to call, but that he couldn’t contact the Torres family, because he didn’t want to compromise the internal-affairs investigation into Christopher’s death. Although the internal review was completed roughly a month after the shooting—a police-department detective interviewed Hilger and Brown in the presence of a union attorney, a union representative, and a “buddy officer,” who provided emotional support—the case still had to be considered by an Independent Review Officer, who was supposed to produce another set of findings, which the department would then review. Schultz said that when he retired, in 2013, this process had yet to be completed.

According to Schultz, a few wayward officers were responsible for the shooting deaths. “Like any other organization, you have that two per cent that are making bad decisions,” he said. In November, 2012, the Department of Justice announced that it would investigate the Albuquerque police force. In a memo, Schultz informed commanders that “most likely the DOJ will find that APD has its house in order. . . . Have your officers stand tall and be proud to be part of our great department.”

Stephen and Renetta Torres met regularly with other parents whose children had been killed by the police. “We are the family that no one wants to be part of,” Ken Ellis, one of the parents, told me. In 2010, his son, a twenty-five-year-old Iraq War veteran, threatened suicide by pointing a handgun at his head outside a convenience store. Several police officers tried to negotiate with him, until an officer saw him “twitch” and shot him in the neck. Ellis drove a truck covered with images of the faces of his son and eleven other young men who had been fatally shot by Albuquerque officers. On one of the back windows, he had a picture of Christopher Torres, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and tentatively smiling. Ellis said that officers had approached him and advised him to take down the pictures, but he refused.

Like many of the families, the Torreses filed a lawsuit against the police department shortly after their son was killed. They also asked the district attorney to press charges. Renetta said that, among the families, paranoia became normal. On her iPhone, she kept seeing an invitation to join a wireless network called Surveillance Van 2. Her neighbor Richard Simes noticed it, too, and drove around the neighborhood looking for the source. He eventually installed surveillance cameras in front of his house and reviewed the footage every day. He said that if he found himself in a crisis he wouldn’t call the Albuquerque police.

Christie Apodaca, the eyewitness, found herself minimizing the time she spent outside her house. The police department had not contacted her, but she noticed a police car parked on the street in front of her house almost every day for seven months. “He could have been there for another reason,” she said. “But I found it very strange that when I walked out to see what was going on he would drive away.”

The Torreses’ daughter-in-law, Nicol, their son Daniel’s wife, said she initially assumed that everyone was being skittish. Then she and her husband noticed that Albuquerque officers kept cruising around their small suburb, even though it was outside the city limits. She told me, “As a white person from the East Coast, with no run-ins with the law, I was very naïve.” Nicol is a research psychologist for the county’s juvenile-detention center, and she believes that her response to Christopher’s death—she was vocal at city-council meetings—has foreclosed the possibility of promotions at work. People avoid her in the hallways. “I don’t get invited to the meetings that I used to, because the mayor will be there or the chief of police will be there,” she said. “No one is going to come out and say, ‘Your career is ruined,’ but these are the signs.” One day after work, she found a note wedged underneath her windshield wiper. It said, “Shut up and watch what you’re doing.”

The Torreses’ oldest son, Matthew, who is a lawyer, sometimes crossed paths with Officer Brown at the courthouse. It infuriated him to know that Brown was testifying in other cases, and that his statements were trusted in court. “He still thinks he’s a cop and I have no business glaring at him,” he said. “I think he murdered my brother, and I’ll do everything I can to make him uncomfortable.”

When Matthew saw that Brown had arrested someone for marijuana possession and that the defendant had no lawyer, he took on the case for nothing, even though his practice is devoted to family law. At the first hearing, he requested that the judge allow him to interview Brown about his unethical behavior. Matthew said that the judge looked bewildered—the defendant hadn’t even shown up in court—and called for a recess. Then she dismissed the case.

In thirty years, no officer in Albuquerque has been indicted for shooting someone. Until recently, officer shootings were evaluated by what the district attorney called an “investigative grand jury.” The jurors did not have the authority to indict, even if they wanted to. They were tasked only with determining whether a shooting was “justified” or “not justified.”

The grand jury lent the process an illusion of objectivity: the district attorney could say that the decision rested with citizens. But prosecutors are dependent on their relationships with police, and the grand jury’s decisions—every shooting in Albuquerque was deemed “justified”—may reveal less about the facts of each case than about the way that prosecutors presented it. After an article on investigative grand juries in the Albuquerque Journal, by a reporter named Jeff Proctor—one of the few local journalists who consistently questioned the police department’s narrative about its shootings—a judge asked the district attorney, Kari Brandenburg, to suspend the practice, in 2013. Brandenburg now reviews the details of police shootings herself and determines whether or not to put the case before a more conventional grand jury.

It took nearly three years for Brandenburg to decide that there was not enough evidence to charge the officers who killed Christopher Torres. She based her decision on the police department’s internal report, which was finally released to the Torreses’ lawyers, Randi McGin and Kathy Love, in 2013. The thirty-nine-page report never mentions Christie Apodaca. It notes that if Christopher were still alive he would have been charged with resisting arrest, disarming a police officer, and aggravated battery on a police officer, in addition to the charges that brought the officers to Christopher’s home. The report was titled “Aggravated Battery on a Police Officer.” The first page identified Christopher as the suspect. The State of New Mexico was listed as the victim.

In the years leading up to Brandenburg’s decision, the Torreses’ lawyers met with Brandenburg three times. They tried to persuade her to indict the officers in Christopher’s death, because the public had lost faith in the police department. Brandenburg, a chatty woman whose office is decorated with animal knickknacks, told the lawyers that she disagreed. She remarked that when she goes to the grocery store or the dentist’s office people approach her and say, “I think the police are doing a good job, and they ought to shoot more criminals.” Brandenburg told me that she still hears this sentiment. The people who make these comments are “not evil people,” she said. “But they lack understanding. They talk as if it doesn’t matter if somebody were to die.”

Four months after Brandenburg declined to bring charges, the Torres family won its civil lawsuit. The judge referred to statements by Apodaca, who testified at the trial, and wrote that she found no credible evidence that Christopher had threatened the cops with a gun. Brown, in his testimony, wouldn’t admit to regretting any decisions. “My choice to jump over the fence was a reaction to his choice not to partake in our conversation,” he said. “If you are asking me ‘would’ve’s’ or ‘could’ve’s,’ I mean, I could have not gone to work that day.”

Richard Hilger appeared more tentative. He said that Christopher, in his attempt to fight the officers, delivered only a “glancing blow” that did not injure anyone. He also acknowledged that some officers in the department might feel pressure to lie in order to corroborate a partner’s story.

Shortly after the civil trial, the Department of Justice published a report detailing how the police fostered a “culture that emphasizes force and complete submission over safety.” The Department of Justice then began negotiating a settlement agreement with the city and the police force. In an e-mail last June, the chief of police, Gorden Eden, who was appointed in early 2014, wrote to his dispatch operators, “Please comply and advise your people: NO one is to meet with DOJ—no one!! DOJ and its representatives have held several meetings with APD officers. This is a CRITICAL MATTER! No one. Make it clear to everyone, it’s got to stop immediately.”

The Department of Justice has investigated more than fifteen police departments in the past four years, and its description of police practices in Albuquerque is arguably the most disparaging. The settlement agreement, which was released this fall, requires that all officers use body cameras (which had previously been required but whose use had not been strictly enforced); that the specialized units, including the canine, bomb, and SWAT teams, more clearly document and justify their activities; and that the department establish a committee that will develop new policies for responding to people who are chronically homeless or mentally ill. To address what it called a culture of “pervasive and deliberate leniency,” the agreement instructs that supervisors in the department be far more vigilant about documenting misconduct. But it does not seek sanctions against officers who had previously used excessive force. Eden said that, in part because of the department’s contract with the police union, “it’s almost impossible to do retroactive discipline, once the time frame has expired.” If officers resist the reforms, Eden said, he will encourage them to retire.

Mayor Berry, who was reëlected in 2013, told me he hoped that the department, by implementing the required reforms, would make Albuquerque a model for the rest of the nation. He traced the number of fatal shootings to the lack of mental-health services in the city, but declined to speculate about other factors that had led the department to its current state. “I just don’t spend any of my time or energy worrying about who did what, why, and when,” he said. “The last thing I want to do as mayor is play the blame game.”

e officers who killed Christopher Torres have never been disciplined. They returned to work after three days of paid leave. Renetta and Stephen Torres are skeptical that the culture and values of the department can change when the cops have not been held accountable. Many of the families who have protested the department’s shootings believed that officers would be charged in the deaths of their sons. When the district attorney declined to bring charges in their own case, they had set their hopes on the cases of other families. Now there is only one case left that has a chance of going to trial: the shooting of James Boyd, a homeless schizophrenic man whose death, last March, was captured on video.

Boyd had been camping illegally in the mountains when an officer ordered him to gather his belongings, including two small knives, and sleep somewhere else. Boyd responded to the request by making threatening, nonsensical comments. Soon, forty-one officers reported to the mountain, and several of them pointed rifles at Boyd. An officer named Keith Sandy, who had been hired the same year as Brown, called Boyd a “fucking lunatic” and joked to a colleague that he’d like to fire a Taser shotgun at Boyd’s penis. (He later told detectives that he and his colleagues talked so much “garbage to one another” that they developed a safe word, “china,” so that they would know when to stop joking.) As Boyd bent down to pick up his belongings, Sandy threw a flash-bang grenade at his feet. When Boyd reached into his pocket and brought out his knives, Sandy and another officer fired six shots at him with their assault rifles. It was the department’s thirty-ninth shooting since 2010. (When citizens protested the shooting by marching through the city, an undercover officer, dressed as a hippie, walked along, videotaping activists.)

Last October, Kari Brandenburg told a police-union attorney that she was leaning toward filing murder charges against the officers who shot Boyd. Within weeks, Brandenburg found herself the target of an investigation by the Albuquerque Police Department. Her twenty-six-year-old son, who was addicted to heroin, had stolen thousands of dollars of his friends’ belongings, and Brandenburg had offered to reimburse them. In late November, an Albuquerque detective gave the state attorney general an investigative file that he said showed that Brandenburg had bribed and intimidated witnesses. In a recording of a conversation between officers working on the case, a detective with the Criminal Intelligence Unit acknowledged that the evidence against Brandenburg appeared insubstantial. He said, “There might be charges—they’re super-weak—it’s probably not gonna go anywhere, but it’s gonna destroy a career.”

A week after the investigation became public, Brandenburg told me that she would continue as district attorney, despite calls for her to leave the office. When I asked her if she saw the investigation as a form of intimidation, a way to prevent her from indicting the officers who shot Boyd, she said, “I think right now it’s best if other people connect the dots.”

On January 12th, Brandenburg filed counts of murder against the two officers who shot Boyd. The case will now go before a district judge, who will determine if there is probable cause to send the officers to trial. At a press conference announcing the charges, Brandenburg said, “I am not going to be intimidated.”

The next day, the Albuquerque police shot and killed another person. According to the police department, the man, who was suspected of stealing, ran away from the officers and fired his gun in their direction. Two cops returned fire, killing the man. One of the cops had killed a civilian in 2011 and the other had been sued in 2010 for using excessive force. Brandenburg sent a prosecutor from her office to the scene of the crime, as she has at every officer shooting in the past decade. But, for the first time, the police barred the prosecutor from attending the police briefing or participating in the investigation. The police department’s attorney told her to go home, saying that her legal advice was not needed.

The Torreses disagree about whether the city has ever apologized to them. Last summer, Mayor Berry met with Stephen and two other fathers, Ken Ellis and Michael Gomez, whose sons had been shot by police officers, men who have since been promoted. Berry extended his condolences and said that he prayed for them. Stephen is satisfied that it was, he said, “as close to an apology as the Mayor’s legal team would allow him.” Renetta, who still hopes that someone will accept responsibility for Christopher’s death, considered this another instance of a politician knowing when to use “nice little phrases.” “It’s hard to be encouraged when you’ve already seen so much double-talk,” she said.

When Christopher’s death was first described by the police department, Stephen had contemplated suing the city for slander, until he realized that the dead have no right to be protected from defamation. He couldn’t understand how Christopher, in the course of an afternoon, had been turned into a stereotype: a dangerous schizophrenic. The family had rarely told people about Christopher’s diagnosis, because they were wary of the meanings that people ascribed to the word. Christopher’s first psychiatrist had told the family, “Let’s hope it’s a brain tumor and not schizophrenia, because a tumor we can do something about.”

Renetta said that she struggled to accept that “you can’t always set things right in the world of your child.” She believed that Christopher had been getting better every year. The side effects from the medications, like muscle stiffness and lethargy, had become less distracting. He was opening up to the idea of going to school. He still heard occasional voices, but, for the most part, he had stopped believing what they said. “Christopher was trying to figure out, ‘How do I fit in?’ ” Renetta said. “He was so close to finding his way.” ♦

Link:

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