One other Albuquerque police officer resigned final week amid a widening scandal involving cops who allegedly conspired with an area protection lawyer to make drunk driving instances disappear in alternate for payoffs. Joshua Montaño, who had been employed by the Albuquerque Police Division (APD) for 19 years, is the fifth officer to stop after being positioned on administrative go away. His March 20 resignation letter, which Metropolis Desk ABQ obtained via a public information request, sheds mild on the extent of the alleged corruption throughout the APD’s DWI unit, the topic of an ongoing FBI investigation in addition to an APD probe.
“When I was put on administrative leave, I thought there would be an opportunity for me to talk to the department about what I knew regarding the FBI’s investigation,” writes Montaño, who missed a number of scheduled interviews with APD investigators previous to his resignation. “I thought there would be a time [when] I could disclose what I knew from within APD and how the issues I let myself get caught up in within the DWI Unit were generational. I thought there would be a time where I could talk about all the other people who should be on administrative leave as well, but aren’t.”
Montaño says he in the end determined towards cooperating with APD investigators. “In order for me to talk to the City about what I knew,” he writes, “I needed to not be the City’s scapegoat for its own failures.” He complains that Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina, who has promised to “make sure that we get to the bottom of this” however is himself beneath investigation for inflicting a February 17 accident that severely injured a driver whose automobile he broadsided, “has made it seem like there are just a few bad officers acting on their own.” That’s “far from the truth,” Montaño says.
Amongst different issues, the FBI reportedly is investigating claims that officers intentionally missed courtroom dates, ensuing within the dismissal of DWI instances. However in accordance with Montaño, “officers all know that our attendance, or non-attendance, at Court is watched over and monitored.” Whereas “I take responsibility for my actions,” he says, the accountability for the alleged misconduct extends up the chain of command and various years again in time.
Medina “has made numerous public statements concerning APD’s knowledge of the FBI’s investigation of various APD personnel and made commitments to complete parallel investigations,” Montaño’s lawyer, Thomas Grover, writes in a separate letter to the division. “However, as is evident in the investigations of Ofc. Montano, the department responded to the FBI’ s inquiries in a manner that is haphazard at best and artificial at worst.”
Though Montaño needed to share “his knowledge of how widespread the issues of concern to the FBI are, how far up the supervisory chain they go, and other personnel they involve,” Grover says, he “could not provide such a statement because of the myriad of deficiencies APD plagued its investigations of him, and presumably others, with. From procedural errors concerning notice requirements to police officers, to timeline violations by APD, it seems at every turn, the department could not follow basic practices for internal affairs investigations.”
When you may low cost Montaño’s try and unfold the blame, it’s broadly per Medina’s description of the conduct that the FBI is investigating. At a February 2 press convention, Medina famous that DWI instances typically are dismissed when officers are unavailable to testify. “Systems that struggle, systems that have loopholes, are really open to corruption,” Medina mentioned. “We’re dealing with stuff that we anticipate started decades ago, and we’ve done a lot of things that have got us to this point. But we will continue to dig and look and leave no stone unturned and make sure that we get to the bottom of this.”
Medina says the issues throughout the DWI might have “started decades ago,” which jibes with Montaño’s description of a “generational” phenomenon. That interval overlaps with Medina’s tenure on the APD, the place he started working in 1995. He was an APD officer for 20 years earlier than retiring as a commander in 2014. After a number of years as police chief of Laguna, New Mexico, he returned to the APD in December 2017 as deputy chief. Three years later, he turned interim chief, a place that was made everlasting in March 2021.
Medina, who as a sergeant and lieutenant labored for the APD’s “Party Patrol,” evidently was not assigned to the DWI unit. However he strove to stop underage ingesting, “work[ing] closely with community partners such as Mothers Against Drunk Driv[ing],” which gave him an award in 2008. The identical group picked Honorio Alba Jr. as its New Mexico “Officer of the Year” in 2023, a number of months earlier than Albuquerque’s Civilian Police Oversight Company acquired a letter about his “questionable conduct,” which triggered the corruption investigation.
As a substitute of arresting an intoxicated driver who almost precipitated a crash whereas dashing and subsequently drove onto a curb, Alba reportedly had referred him to a particular native lawyer. Alba resigned final month previous to a scheduled interview with the APD’s inside affairs division.
Like Alba, Montaño has been implicated in a fishy association with the identical DWI protection lawyer, Thomas Clear, whose workplace the FBI has searched as a part of its investigation. Federal brokers even have searched the houses of APD officers.
Thus far no costs have been filed. However in response to the corruption allegations, the Bernalillo County District Lawyer’s Workplace dropped some 200 DWI instances, saying it couldn’t depend on the testimony of the cops who had made the arrests. KOB, the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque, experiences that Alba was the arresting officer in a lot of these instances. KRQE, the native CBS affiliate, checked out DWI instances filed throughout the earlier six years. It discovered that Montaño “was named as the officer in at least 36 cases” by which the defendants had been represented by Clear, and “nearly 90% of those cases ended in dismissals.”
Three different officers who had been positioned on administrative go away—Lt. Justin Hunt, Officer Harvey Johnson, and Officer Nelson Ortiz—resigned previous to Montaño. Taking a look at “85 DWI cases dating back to 2017” involving Clear and Alba, Montaño, Johnson, or Ortiz, Metropolis Desk ABQ discovered that 14 p.c ended with trial convictions or plea offers, which is “much lower than the Metro Court average of 56% convictions in DWI cases over the same years.” The opposite 86 p.c had been dismissed, sometimes as a result of officers didn’t present up at pretrial interviews or hearings. The “vast majority” of the defendants had been arrested by Alba or Montaño.
In line with an APD spokesman, two extra officers are beneath investigation. “There is a much bigger story here,” Grover informed Metropolis Desk ABQ. “If Officer Montaño is a cinder block in this saga, there’s a whole wall to address. It goes outward and upward.”