Sheriff's investigation of Steve Tellez into 7th week. What do we make of that?

The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office/Dept investigation of former APS Chief of Police has entered its 7th week.  There is still no end in sight.

When the Sheriff's PIO last briefed the establishment media, there was an end in sight.  He indicated that the investigation would take two weeks.

We're into the 7th week now.

The fact that Bernalillo County Sheriff Dan Houston; the guy who sits behind the desk where the buck stops, isn't saying anything is significant.

Something is said, when they say nothing at all.

There is only one reason to hide the truth; that is to escape the consequences of telling the truth.

My experience and cynicism lead me to believe that the Sheriff's detectives have found evidence of a culture of corruption and incompetence in the leadership of the APS.  And now, the "powers that be" would like to keep it hidden.

They have found circumstances that allegedly led one of the senior-most administrators in the entire APS to believe that he could walk off with public property being stored in plain sight, and get away with it.

Nobody allegedly does anything, unless they think they're going to get away with it.

It isn't power that corrupts.  It isn't money.
It is temptation that corrupts, and rather absolutely.
The greater the temptation the more inevitable the corruption.
The more certain you are that you're going to get away with doing something wrong, the greater the temptation, the more likely you are to do it.  Do the (human nature) math.

Which presents a greater temptation?;

• a hundred dollar bill lying loose on a table in a casino, or 
• a hundred dollar bill lying loose in an empty hallway?

Which presents a greater temptation and therefore a greater likelihood that people will think they can walk off with public property and get away with it;

• an administration where there is actual and honest accountability to meaningful standards of conduct and competence within public service, 

or,

• an administration with little or no actual honest accountability even to the law.

Talk about an empty hallway.

Blame Journal Managing Editor Kent Walz.  He has allowed his personal relationship with people like School Board enforcer Marty Esquivel to interfere with his greater obligation to the people who trust that he will tell them the truth about the spending of their power and resources in the APS.

Blame all the heavy hitters at the Journal, KRQE, KOAT, and KOB who steadfastly refuse to investigate and report upon the ethics and accountability scandal in the leadership of the APS.

Blame them for not putting pressure on Dan Houston, to tell us what the hell is going on with his investigation of still more felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators.

How is a felony criminal investigation of a member of the administrative inner circle of the local school district, one of the twenty or so biggest in the country, not newsworthy?  If only to report that it's all a big misunderstanding and everything is hunky-dory;

• APS really does have standards of conduct and competence high enough to protect the public interests.

and

• the accountability to those standards is so swift, so certain, and so inescapable - even for the most powerful politicians and public servants in the APS

that there is no temptation and therefore, no culture of corruption, and no culture of incompetence.

Either way its newsworthy.  They won't report either version.
That makes them complacent, complicit, incompetent or
just plain lazy.




photos Mark Bralley