APS Top Cop Finds Himself on Hot Seat. Again and again.

It would appear that APS Police Chief Steve Tellez will join the list of APS Top Cops to leave under a cloud of allegations of wrong doing.

They will remain allegations, I suspect, because APS' past practice is to put them on leave until their contracts expire and then not renew them.

They have to do that because if they actually fired them, everyone would end up in court and all kinds of nasty facts would find themselves in the public record.

Court is the last place the leadership of the APS wants to meet with a disgruntled former police chief ready to spill his guts.

As the head of APS' publicly funded private police force, chiefs are called upon on occasion, to extricate senior administrators and board members from delicate situations;  situations that senior administrators and board members would rather not be discussed in open court.  Remember when then APS Assoc Supt Michael Vigil was caught drunk driving, he wanted the APD cop to let him call Gil Lovato.  It was in the hope that Lovato could get him out of a jam.

 Lovato replaced a chief whose APS career also ended in scandal.

Lovato's scandal was reported in the Journal, link, in early 2007.

The leadership of the APS found themselves twixt a rock and a hard place;  they needed to fire Lovato but if they did, they'd end up in court and he would spill his guts about their collective and individual corruption and incompetence.  He probably helped more than a few of them out of problems they'd gotten into in the middle of the night.

The Journal reported that APS Chief Legal Counsel Art Melendres had said that Lovato's lawyer, Sam Bregman had told him, when Gil Lovato gets to court, there won't be a single APS senior administrator left standing. It wasn't an idle boast.

Tellez holds the same cards Lovato held, the mother of all body maps.  APS Chiefs of Police are pivotal in covering up various administrative and executive misconduct.

Tellez is part of a cover up of his own.

When Lovato was sent home on paid leave, Tellez became the acting chief.   It was under his command, the APS Police force self-investigated the allegations against Lovato and the leadership APS Police force.

The APS Police were the only police of any kind, who investigated felony criminal misconduct in the leadership of the APS.

Tellez was second in command during the scandal.

As the second in command, Tellez was complicit, complacent in the ongoing scandalous conduct, or he remained ignorant of behavior Lovato was making no effort to hide.

Tellez, because he was not part of ending the scandal was corrupt in his participation or incompetent in his ignorance of it.

Nevertheless, the leadership of the APS put him in charge of the investigation of the corruption what amounts to his own incompetence and or corruption.

Tellez and the leadership of the APS have been hiding not only the findings of the APS Police force investigation, but the findings of all of the other investigations into the scandal as well.

The leadership of the APS will send Tellez home with full pay.
He will remain there until his contract expires.

He will not end up in court because, if he ever got to court,
the whole truth would become public knowledge and

... there wouldn't be a single senior APS administrator left standing.




photos Mark Bralley