As the federally mandated reform of the Albuquerque Police Department closes in on 10 years — and the end is in sight — community policing groups have begun thinking about what comes next.
With that in mind, a policing expert who has worked on consent decrees in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Md., visited the Southwest Community Policing Council on Wednesday.
In his presentation “After the Consent Decree” Carlton Mayers II, Esq. stressed that stakeholders in the reform effort have to prepare to build on the progress made over the past nine years. The city is now at 94% compliance with the Court Approved Settlement Agreement, which it entered into after the U.S. Department of Justice determined Albuquerque police officers had a pattern of using excessive force.
“When your consent decree is terminated — because it’s going to get terminated one day, you’re not going to be under consent decree forever — you have to have a plan,” Mayers said. “Something solid, tangible, actionable, and workable that involves every stakeholder in the community being able to have feedback, input and meaningful decision-making authority over how that is going to work going forward.”
As the former director of the NAACP Nationalist Criminal Justice Reform Program for the country, Mayers co-authored a report in 2014 that provided historical context and information on how to end racial profiling.
Since then, he has established his own company, Mayers Strategic Solutions LLC, and continued to work with state and local governments, law enforcement agencies, community-based organizations, and community members to improve public safety by improving relationships between the police and the community and curbing gun violence among the Black and Indigenous communities and other persons of color.
The most important part of a consent decree, Mayers said, is bringing people together rather than keeping them separate.
“Because at the end of the day, if you speak to anybody who’s either a criminal right now or has been a criminal — meaning that they’ve been incarcerated — they will tell you the number one reason why crime thrives in a community is when the different stakeholders in the community are not communicating with law enforcement,” he said.
Community empowerment, accountability and transparency
Mayers’ organization uses what he calls the “C.A.T.” method which stands for community empowerment, accountability and transparency. He said each component of the method must be achieved for it to be successful.
The first component — community empowerment — involves building relationships between stakeholders in neighborhoods where crime is occurring and there’s a history of negative police interactions.
“They have criminals they’ve got to deal with and they’ve got law enforcement they don’t trust because law enforcement has acted like criminals towards them, so they are in a predicament where they’re like, ‘what do I do,’” he said.
Those who live on those blocks, in those neighborhoods, and in those zip codes have to be involved and have meaningful decision-making authority over all direct police and civilian interactions, Mayers said.
“Those individuals in particular especially need to be at the helm of decision-making,” he said. “Why? Because at the end of the day, the people closest to the problems are also the people closest to the solutions.”
The next component of the program is accountability.
“This involves creating an inhospitable environment for those who engage in misconduct, by establishing both internal and external accountability mechanisms that would work together,” Mayers said.
The last component is transparency, which he defines as the interconnectedness and coordination among the sheriff’s offices, state and local police departments, elected officials, government agencies, community members, community-based organizations, direct service providers, faith-based organizations, private businesses, and local media.
“So, according to my definition of transparency, all of these aspects of the community would need to work together through interconnectedness and coordination — with equity and inclusivity — to serve as one community to support public safety and ensure police accountability through more proactive, rather than reactive strategies,” he said.