APS and APD police officers are working at cross purposes

In many circumstances, you will find both APS police officers and APD police officers on APS campuses.

Their purpose there generally runs in parallel but at the most fundamental level, contradict.

Albuquerque Police Department officers are there to enforce the law as they understand it and according to the discretion they are allowed as police officers.

Albuquerque Public Schools officers are there to enforce the law according to the discretion of principals, superintendents and school board members.

However outlandish that sounds, however unbelievable,
all you have to do is ask an APS officer whether they are
following their own conscience and discretion, or
following administrative directives, link.

The APS Police force is a publicly funded private police force.  They answer directly to, and only to the leadership of the APS.  Ask, if you don't believe me.

There is a problem; a conflict of interests.

The leadership of the APS does not want students to be charged with crimes on campus.  It looks bad.

I had a high school principal once tell me;

"If I told the truth about what is going on at my (high)school, the realtors in my neighborhood would have my neck."

I had an APS Supt once tell me, when I was relaying the teachers union interest in teachers knowing the truth about what is going on at their own schools;

"You can't just tell the truth, you never know how someone might want to use it."

A recent enough audit by the Council of the Great City Schools found; administrators routinely "falsified crime statistics" to protect the public image of their schools.

School principals, superintendents and school board members do not have legal authority to decide which laws will and will not be enforced.  They do not have the authority to decide which students will and will not be arrested.  They do it because they can.

They do it because they cannot be held actually, honestly accountable for doing it.

They will tell you, if they answer your question at all;

• They are protecting the interests of children.

• They don't want young children to be branded as "criminals".

• They want (some) children who commit (some) crimes to be indistinguishable from all children who commit no crimes;

... standing in favor of open
honest and public two-way
communication between the
leadership of the APS and the
community members they
serve.

If nothing else, it's more than
just a little unfair to children
who commit no crimes at all.

Ayn Rand wrote;
It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men's virtues and from condemning men's vices. 

When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you - whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

Whether young children should or should not be arrested and charged with criminal misconduct is an important question, worth discussing; openly, honestly, and publicly.  We need to know exactly how much discretion is allowed the leadership of the APS.  We need to know whether they are abusing their discretion in their own interests.  What impartial oversight is there?

Ask them.

Better yet, ask Kent Walz and
the Journal to ask them, link.

They'll get right on it.




photo Mark Bralley