The Obscenity of Scott Greenwood and Tom Streicher: (Yet Another) Scandal in Alburquerque

"We're not starving, we're just hungry..."

Of all people in the United States these two characters from the Buckeye State, Scott Greenwood and Tom Streicher, somehow got themselves hired in Albuquerque at $350 per hour plus expenses. (Just look at them, it's ludicrous! If we're making a nasty porno, at least give us some eye candy!) Their billings, already in the six figures, were "earned" presiding over the cut and paste job that is the DOJ Consent Decree on unconstitutional policing by the APD (27 fatalities, many of them unarmed, just since 2010). 

But $350 an hour is apparently not sufficient remuneration for the duo and they got caught scraping the bottom of the commonweal's cookie jar, scratching for every last green chile flavored crumb. One can only imagine how mortified Council Members Ken Sanchez, Isaac Benton, Brad Winter, Diane Gibson, Trudy Jones and Don Harris, who voted in favor of the contract, must be for their lack of discernment. They have to be thinking, What other foxes have we naively let into the chicken coop even after being repeatedly warned during public comments by the people who saw through these two?!

And what kind of contract could CABQ possibly have approved wherein these kinds of pecuniary abuses are not immediate grounds for its dissolution? We don't have the final tally yet, but under New Mexico statutes: 30-16-1. Larceny.  D. "Whoever commits larceny when the value of the property stolen is over five hundred dollars ($500) but not more than two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) is guilty of a fourth degree felony." A defendant convicted of a fourth degree felony in New Mexico faces up to eighteen months in prison and a fine up to $5,000. Shall I call Corrections Secretary Marcantel and reserve a couple of luxury suites in the prison in Clovis just in case?

KRQE broke the story; not sure why.

By now it's dawning on everyone in the Land of Enchantment not enchanted into a stuporous coma that these DOJ Consent Decrees are fabulously enriching business opportunities for the "experts" who jimmy up some expertise. In this case Greenwood's past gig at the ACLU, cynically trading on its brand for personal gain, and Streicher's tenure as a police chief whose own department was the object of DOJ scrutiny for the killing of 15 Black men in five years, many of them unarmed. Yep, if I read this summary of his chiefdom right those are his qualifications--a pile of corpses and a record of resistance to departmental reform. 

If Albuquerque's lucky it'll get some of the money back after the audit, and if Greenwood and Streicher are lucky they'll somehow avoid being indicted by District Attorney Brandenburg for theft from the people of New Mexico. But in all likelihood the conditions that led to the too-tempting-to-resist spending spree will not be altered, and the people of Albuquerque will remain on their knees tithing heavily to the well-established Church of Endemic Corruption posing as the Chapel of Anomalous Malfeasance. 

A buckeye. 'Nuff said.

I wrote, just this morning, to Councilman Brad Winter to see if he would be demanding an apology for the rip-offs from the Buck Eye Boyz Gang, and to learn if he's planning on proposing setting reasonable expense guidelines for outside consultants. I'll happily publish his response when it arrives sometime after the end of the Anthropocene.

Another question I asked Winter was whether the mounting pile of evidence of bad stewardship of taxpayer resources is concerning to him vis a vis Albuquerque's bond ratings in the capital markets. But I might've saved the pixels. After speaking with a press officer in Moody's NYC office, Albuquerque has little to fear from the bond rating agencies. They're looking solely at factors that could have an impact on the city's ability to repay its debts in bond instruments over 20 to 30 years.  

Even money damages from wrongful death and injury lawsuits in the tens of millions are a mere rounding error in its $870 million annual budget. And while good governance is one of Moody's metrics, I was advised that they never give prescriptive advice. Poof went my fantasy of having our corporate overlords rein in a governmental body unable to hold itself accountable, even a teensy little bit. 

I also wrote to Mister (gotta spell it out for him) Scott Greenwood himself and offered space here for him and Streicher to say how very sorry they are. Not just for getting caught, but for flaunting their white male privilege and class entitlement in a decadent display of Gimme!

An uncanny resemblance to that ole Buckeye Scott Greenwood stuffing his face.

Additionally, in their self-selected role as the people's guardians of the DOJ Consent Decree process I also wrote to APD Forward, specifically to ACLU-NM Exec. Dir. Peter Simonson in his capacity as spokesman, to learn what its position on the expense scandal might be. I had hoped to find an excoriating statement on their website (it's been ten days since the scandal broke), and really don't know to what to attribute the group's silence on the matter.  It reflects so very poorly on them. With watchdogs like these...

Frankly, I don't expect to hear back from Mister Simonson because I may have pissed him off months ago in a little listserv contretemps when in so many words I expressed the concern that he himself may be lusting after one of these plummy consultant gigs in some other poor unsuspecting American city being held hostage by a militarized police force. All he had to do is say he wouldn't touch a gig like that with a 10-foot pole...but to everyone's disappointment, he didn't.

And if it's the case that he's upset with me for even suggesting that such a future lucrative possibility may be motivating and influencing his actions and inaction in the here and now, well...c'est la vie.

Unlike Moody's, Written Word, Spoken Word does offer prescriptive advice, even unsolicited!

Perhaps Ken Ellis, Steve Torres, Mike Gomez, or other of the family members of APD victims who are part of the organization and whose moral authority blankets APD Forward in a patina of conscience, might wish to secure a public statement from everyone on the legal team that they will not seek such lucrative consultancies using APD Forward as a launching pad. It would feel a lot cleaner.

This comes to mind because I'm sure I'm not the only reader who felt some measure of disdain for the tepid and obfuscating  APD Forward Analysis (for Dummies?) of the 106-page agreement. In its initial iteration anyway, the APD Forward legal team offered up bullet points and "Bottom Lines" that give little of the sense of what a crushing disappointment and betrayal of good faith this document is.

Bottom Line: Though they get kudos for slogging through the 106 pages of info dump in the document that now governs the APD reform process, APD Forward pulled a heckuva lot of punches in conveying the document's significance in maintaining the status quo in power relations.

 So different in tone and substance from La Jicarita's David Correia (one of the Burque 13) who concluded in his analysis:

"If there was one thing that no one believed, it was that APD could police itself. And yet, the idea that the solution to APD is APD is at the very heart of this Agreement. And DOJ’s faith in APD’s ability and willingness to police itself produces its share of absurdities.

Consider the section that actually “requires” that APD officers self-report their misconduct “to a supervisor or directly to the Internal Affairs Bureau.” Or the part of the Agreement that now requires that APD officers carry officer-misconduct complaint forms wherever they go. “Officer, once you’re done violating my constitutional rights, could you pass me one of those complaint forms in your pocket?” Or the section titled “Community and Problem-Oriented Policing” that actually includes the following sentence: “APD shall ensure that officers are familiar with the geographic areas they serve.” Or the fact that the Agreement leaves it up to APD to train its officers in “leadership, ethics and interpersonal skills.” I laughed out loud so often while reading this Agreement that my daughter, in the other room, thought I was watching a sitcom.

The women in the first row--Nora Anaya, Barbara Grothus and Kathy Brown--3 of the Burque 13, watching CABQ unanimously pass the Agreement negotiated by Streicher and Greenwood.The Burque 13 went to jail, incurred injuries, lost income, faced ridicule, and are still not out from under the legal wrangling with the City, while the Buckeye gang gobbles down $53 steak dinners on their dime. Mike Gomez, whose son Alan was shot in the back by by APD officer Sean Wallace (back row), is a portrait of parental anguish.

But the Agreement is no sitcom; it’s a horror show. In section after section, the DOJ identifies a problem and then charges the very agency responsible for creating that problem with coming up with a plan to fix it. The DOJ noted profound deficiencies in Internal Affairs investigations of officer-involved use of force. This Agreement “solves” that problem by requiring that APD “ensure that investigations of officer misconduct complaints shall be as thorough as necessary to reach reliable and complete findings.” The Agreement describes new requirements for crisis intervention training, requires new processes for officer misconduct investigation, and defines new oversight responsibilities for brass. but in every case—in every case—leaves it up to APD to achieve those goals. Each obligation or requirement in the Agreement is followed with a sentence that includes the language “APD shall develop and implement” or “APD shall revise and update its policies and procedures ” or “APD shall develop objective criteria for.” The only evidence that DOJ was involved in drafting this Agreement is the fact that much of it is plagiarized from other consent decrees. Otherwise, it reads as though drafted by APD itself.

We live in a city with a police department that routinely violates the constitutional rights of the people it’s charged to serve. It kills and brutalizes people at an alarming rate and with a frightening precision and it’s been doing it for decades. And, after this Agreement, there’s no end in sight."