"Ex-APS police chief won’t face charges" Journal headline

... albeit down in the very bottom corner of page B6.

I would provide for you, a link, except that a search of the Journal's website using the title does not provide one.

The Journal has now "covered" two former APS Chiefs of Police who were involved in felony criminal misconduct.  They have in common; neither was prosecuted by Bernalillo County District Attorney Kari Brandenburg.

The reasons they were not prosecuted are the same.

Former APS Police Chief Steve Tellez was not prosecuted apparently because the package of evidence and testimony that finally reached the DA (actually a Deputy DA) did not warrant prosecution.

That's fine.  Those are the calls DA's are supposed to make; decisions in the best interests of the people they serve.  I mean seriously; a search warrant executed a month and more after it should have been!

The reason the case of the APS Chief before, Gil Lovato, was not prosecuted was entirely different.  The DA never considered his prosecution one way or the other.    District Attorney Kari Brandenburg never saw the evidence of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators.

The reason Brandenburg never saw the evidence, and never therefore decided one way or the other, whether the people's interests would be served by criminal prosecution, was because the evidence was deliberately withheld from her examination.

I know she knew they were withholding evidence because we talked about it.  She told me that she was powerless to make APS hand over the evidence. 

The only investigations ever done of allegations of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators were done by APS' own private investigators and their own police force; a publicly funded private police force accountable directly to, and only to, the leadership of the APS.

The findings of those investigations were never turned over to the DA. They have been hidden behind APS lawyers and unlimited budgets for legal weaselry and litigation, ever since.

Right now, today in fact, taxpayers will spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on lawyers and litigation against the public interests in APS' ongoing effort to keep public records hidden, in utter disregard for the spirit or the letter of the NM Inspection of Public Records Act.

So why is the fact that Tellez won't be prosecuted, apparently newsworthy, while at the same time the fact that Gil Lovato and others were never prosecuted (and why they were not), is not?

Why is the cover up of a cover up by APS School Board and their lawyers, of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators, not newsworthy?

Well, it is newsworthy.  If anything ever was, this is.
If the allegations were nonsense, it would be news.  If for no other reason than the number of operational dollars that would be saved if Esquivel and his lawyers actually had a leg, upon which to stand.

So there must be some other reason that Journal Editor in Chief Kent Walz will not investigate and report upon the cover up of the cover up of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators and the millions of dollars being squandered.

Remember with me, link, it was Walz along with his buddy Defendant Marty Esquivel who got together and bamboozled the NM FOG into giving APS Supt Winston Brooks an award for being a "hero of transparency" while the three of them all knew full well that felonies had been committed, findings had been hidden and statutes of limitation on felony criminal misconduct were expiring.

Kent Walz is not alone of course.  No one in the establishment's press will ask the board to explain why they will not produce ethically redacted records of findings of investigations of allegations of felony criminal misconduct involving senior APS administrators.

If I suggested there is a conspiracy afoot, that would make me a nut, right?




photo Mark Bralley