One other Albuquerque police officer resigned final week amid a widening scandal involving cops who allegedly conspired with a neighborhood protection lawyer to make drunk driving circumstances disappear in alternate for payoffs. Joshua Montaño, who had been employed by the Albuquerque Police Division (APD) for 19 years, is the fifth officer to stop after being positioned on administrative go away. His March 20 resignation letter, which Metropolis Desk ABQ obtained by means of a public information request, sheds gentle on the extent of the alleged corruption inside the APD’s DWI unit, the topic of an ongoing FBI investigation in addition to an APD probe.
“After I was placed on administrative go away, I believed there could be a possibility for me to speak to the division about what I knew relating to the FBI’s investigation,” writes Montaño, who missed a number of scheduled interviews with APD investigators previous to his resignation. “I believed there could be a time [when] I may disclose what I knew from inside APD and the way the problems I let myself get caught up in inside the DWI Unit had been generational. I believed there could be a time the place I may discuss all the opposite individuals who must be on administrative go away as nicely, however aren’t.”
Montaño says he in the end determined towards cooperating with APD investigators. “To ensure that me to speak to the Metropolis about what I knew,” he writes, “I wanted to not be the Metropolis’s scapegoat for its personal failures.” He complains that Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina, who has promised to “be sure that we resolve this” however is himself beneath investigation for inflicting a February 17 accident that severely injured a driver whose automobile he broadsided, “has made it seem to be there are only a few dangerous officers appearing on their very own.” That’s “removed from the reality,” Montaño says.
Amongst different issues, the FBI reportedly is investigating claims that officers intentionally missed court docket dates, ensuing within the dismissal of DWI circumstances. However in response to Montaño, “officers all know that our attendance, or non-attendance, at Courtroom is watched over and monitored.” Whereas “I take accountability for my actions,” he says, the accountability for the alleged misconduct extends up the chain of command and quite a lot of years again in time.
Medina “has made quite a few public statements regarding APD’s data of the FBI’s investigation of assorted APD personnel and made commitments to finish parallel investigations,” Montaño’s lawyer, Thomas Grover, writes in a separate letter to the division. “Nevertheless, as is clear within the investigations of Ofc. Montano, the division responded to the FBI’ s inquiries in a fashion that’s haphazard at greatest and synthetic at worst.”
Though Montaño needed to share “his data of how widespread the problems of concern to the FBI are, how far up the supervisory chain they go, and different personnel they contain,” Grover says, he “couldn’t present such an announcement due to the myriad of deficiencies APD plagued its investigations of him, and presumably others, with. From procedural errors regarding discover necessities to law enforcement officials, to timeline violations by APD, it appears at each flip, the division couldn’t observe fundamental practices for inner affairs investigations.”
When you may low cost Montaño’s try and unfold the blame, it’s broadly in step with Medina’s description of the conduct that the FBI is investigating. At a February 2 press convention, Medina famous that DWI circumstances typically are dismissed when officers are unavailable to testify. “Methods that wrestle, techniques which have loopholes, are actually open to corruption,” Medina stated. “We’re coping with stuff that we anticipate began many years in the past, and we have performed a number of issues that have gotten us thus far. However we’ll proceed to dig and look and go away no stone unturned and be sure that we resolve this.”
Medina says the issues inside the DWI might have “began many years in the past,” which jibes with Montaño’s description of a “generational” phenomenon. That interval overlaps with Medina’s tenure on the APD, the place he started working in 1995. He was an APD officer for 20 years earlier than retiring as a commander in 2014. After a number of years as police chief of Laguna, New Mexico, he returned to the APD in December 2017 as deputy chief. Three years later, he turned interim chief, a place that was made everlasting in March 2021.
Medina, who as a sergeant and lieutenant labored for the APD’s “Celebration Patrol,” evidently was not assigned to the DWI unit. However he strove to forestall underage ingesting, “work[ing] intently with group companions resembling Moms In opposition to Drunk Driv[ing],” which gave him an award in 2008. The identical group picked Honorio Alba Jr. as its New Mexico “Officer of the 12 months” in 2023, a number of months earlier than Albuquerque’s Civilian Police Oversight Company obtained a letter about his “questionable conduct,” which triggered the corruption investigation.
As an alternative of arresting an intoxicated driver who practically precipitated a crash whereas dashing and subsequently drove onto a curb, Alba reportedly had referred him to a particular native lawyer. Alba resigned final month previous to a scheduled interview with the APD’s inner affairs division.
Like Alba, Montaño has been implicated in a fishy association with the identical DWI protection lawyer, Thomas Clear, whose workplace the FBI has searched as a part of its investigation. Federal brokers even have searched the houses of APD officers.
To date no costs have been filed. However in response to the corruption allegations, the Bernalillo County District Lawyer’s Workplace dropped some 200 DWI circumstances, saying it couldn’t depend on the testimony of the cops who had made the arrests. KOB, the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque, studies that Alba was the arresting officer in lots of these circumstances. KRQE, the native CBS affiliate, checked out DWI circumstances filed throughout the earlier six years. It discovered that Montaño “was named because the officer in no less than 36 circumstances” by which the defendants had been represented by Clear, and “practically 90% of these circumstances resulted in dismissals.”
Three different officers who had been positioned on administrative go away—Lt. Justin Hunt, Officer Harvey Johnson, and Officer Nelson Ortiz—resigned previous to Montaño. Taking a look at “85 DWI circumstances relationship again to 2017” involving Clear and Alba, Montaño, Johnson, or Ortiz, Metropolis Desk ABQ discovered that 14 p.c ended with trial convictions or plea offers, which is “a lot decrease than the Metro Courtroom common of 56% convictions in DWI circumstances over the identical years.” The opposite 86 p.c had been dismissed, sometimes as a result of officers didn’t present up at pretrial interviews or hearings. The “overwhelming majority” of the defendants had been arrested by Alba or Montaño.
In keeping with an APD spokesman, two extra officers are beneath investigation. “There’s a a lot greater story right here,” Grover advised Metropolis Desk ABQ. “If Officer Montaño is a cinder block on this saga, there’s a complete wall to handle. It goes outward and upward.”