Dan Houston and his PIO, are they being honest about the APS Tellez investigation?

Bernalillo County Sheriff Dan Houston sits behind the desk where the buck stops on deliberately misleading the people.

If Houston's PIO Aaron Williamson is being dishonest, Sheriff Dan Houston is being dishonest.

If Houston is paying no attention to what Williamson is saying on his behalf, that's Houston's problem.  He will find that willing ignorance is not a particularly good defense, even under the law.

On March 11 of this year, the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department began a criminal investigation of the former Albuquerque Public Schools Chief of Police Steve Tellez.

Tellez was part of the innermost circle of leadership in one of the largest school districts in the nation.

It makes a difference what happened, and more importantly, how it was enabled to happen.

A week from Friday will mark the end of the fourth month of the BCSD investigation.

photo, BCSD website

PIO Williamson is getting touchy about being asked questions about why the investigation is taking so long.  He has taken to YELLING at me in his latest response.

The facts are these;

1. Williamson claims the investigation is being held up by a "third party".  He says the third party has information that is critical to concluding the investigation, and further, that they will not produce that information.

2. Williamson will not identify the third party, nor  will he describe with reasonable specificity the nature of the information they are failing to produce.

3. Williamson told me, if the third party doesn't finally produce the information, the Sheriff's Department will take legal action against the third party.

4. Williamson refuses to identify the statute, rule, regulation, etc the third party will have broken.  He further refuses to identify the venue where they will file their complaint against the third party.

And now he's YELLING at me to stop asking questions.

If this all sounds a little fishy, it is because it is.

The "third party" is likely the leadership of the APS and their lawyers, together spending enormous amounts of money in order to flaunt the law and get away with it.  They spend without limit and without oversight.  It's all done in secret.

The "information" they won't produce is likely a public record of incompetence and corruption in the leadership of the APS and their publicly funded private police force.

They are, right now, in federal court spending money hand over fist in an effort to continue to hide the findings of the 2007 investigations of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators.

This is where "the press" as imagined by the writers of the First Amendment, is supposed to come in to play.

This is where the press informs the people, who then do their duty by going to the steps of government and petitioning for redress of their grievance.

But the press in Albuquerque has been corrupted by their personal and professional ties with the people they're supposed to be reporting on.  At the managerial level, their interest is in perpetuating the cover up of felony public corruption in the leadership of the APS, not in exposing it.

Since writing;

government shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press, 

the government has done exactly that.

They wrote a law that says they can abridge the rights of the press by issuing "credentials" to whomever they like and denying them to whomever they don't like, and then enforcing exclusion on any of the press who don't have whatever trinket or talisman, artifact or fetish, mascot or mojo, they want as proof of membership in "the press" and therefore entitled to Constitutional protection of their human right to be the press.

The failure of the local press to expose the corruption in the leadership of the APS, is what happens when the government gets to decide who can and who cannot, investigate and report upon the government.

Not one of the establishment's press will investigate and report upon credible testimony and evidence of felony public corruption in the leadership of the APS; not the Journal, not KRQE, not KOAT, and not KOB TV.

Nor will any one of them will report the even more newsworthy contrary; taxpayers and other stakeholders' interests are in safe hands; the allegations are a bunch of hooey and, in truth,

1. the leadership of the APS and their police force have high standards of conduct and competence and furthermore,
2. the leadership of the APS can be held honesty and actually accountable to those standards, even against their will.

They can't report those of course, because

1. they do not, and
2. they can not be.

photos Mark Bralley