Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Peeling Layers

I have the feeling that watching the APD come after the DA on her son's crimes as a drug addict will turn into something akin to peeling an onion.  There will always be another layer of intrigue.

Yesterday, Kari Brandenburg, did a great job of defending herself against the cops who leaked a story to a salivating Albuquerque Journal that put the charges out there that the DA kept her son out of trouble by agreeing to pay for items stolen from his victims.  Once again, any parent would do that, but not every parent is a DA whose job it is to charge people with crimes.  Muddy waters.

But for an investigation to be leaked to the Journal in which the cops never even interviewed the DA is highly weird.  There is something else afoot here I think.  It may just be the general incompetence of the APD in dealing with its image.  Or maybe it is a warning shot across the bow that the DA better not indict any cops in shootings of unarmed people.  Although that has not happened anyway.  But maybe Brandenburg in looking around the country feels she must now take action against the cops who gunned down that homeless man in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains.

Someone should call Janet Blair, the recently departed APD public relations person, to see if she would be willing to talk about how decisions like this are made at APD.  They certainly never listened to her because she was not one of the 'club' there.  So of course she probably viewed at an outsider.  That whole 'us against them' philosophy in APD.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

APD took down District Judge Pat Murdoch, whom it didn't like, with a dubious-from-the-start criminal case that ultimately collapsed. Will be interesting to see if this investigation goes nowhere as well and is all about the collateral damage along the way.

Anonymous said...

APD is a mess, first Murdoch, then Chris Garcia, now Brandenburg. They leak investigations that ruin peoples lives and then no criminal charges are ever filed. I wish Murdoch and Garcia would have sued Schultz and APD for what they did to them. Maybe Kari will.

New Mexican said...

Looking at it from a distance it appears strange. Why did the APD not involve or allow some other LE agency to take the lead on this? Why release the information by leaking it when it did, the timing is of interest. Ms. Brandberg may not be ruined but APD and the Journal sure are trying to do her in. The Journal is a very biased publication and APD knew that. It will be interesting.

Anonymous said...

Base on the facts reported in the Journal articles, the charges of "bribery of a witness and intimidation of a witness" are very weak at best. There may be probable cause to charge, but to get a conviction, you have to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was intentionally committed. All Brandenburg said was I did not violate the law. The problem may be a breach of ethics and the appearance of impropriety by a pubic official using her position to help her son. Brandenburg never specifically denied that she offered to make restitution for her son in exchange for them not to file charges. What could have just as easily happend is that the so called victims demanded restitution and said if they were not paid, they would file charges. APD should have contacted her to get her version of events, but did not. Kari is known to be very well off financially.

Anonymous said...

No one holds APD in lower regard than I do (and if you never hear from me again that should be proof enough) but if her son committed crimes, he committed crimes. You can't just make that go away with money or influence or access or anything else.

Those peoples' homes and sense of security were violated. What if someone had walked in on him while he was there. Or what if he shot someone? Etc., etc.

There are two separate issues, on the one hand. I'll grant all of you that. This might be a vehicle for showing just how rotten to the core the APD is.

But on the other hand there is this notion that certain people, like cops, like DAs, like a lot of people, are above the law or somehow outside the law, and in that sense the whole lot of them should be thrown in the Metropolitan Detention Center. I'll volunteer to back my truck up to city hall.

Anonymous said...

The Santa Fe Reporter's Morning Word has a link to a Washington Post article showing New Mexico as one of the most corrupt states in the union. It shows that all three branches of government in New Mexico are corrupt. The study didn't include local governments which might have increased our corruption rating. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt in New Mexico.

Anonymous said...

There probably isn't a universal definition of corruption. Yesterday the Washington Post was being criticized for refusing to call torture torture. They were still calling it enhanced interrogation, helping to corrupt the meaning of the word "torture."

When the police use their power to launch an investigation, and to leak details of it, or when a DA uses her position to undo a crime that's already been committed, what's being corrupted, or not, is the idea of what government is. That has to be argued, or agreed upon, first. That's some of what's happening in this discussion, I think. In New Mexico that idea has a different history. Government was established here independently of the east, actually before it was established in the east, and even to some degree independently of the south or even Spain.

Maybe government evolved here to preserve the family rather than a more abstract "society." This might explain the mafia-like characteristics of the APD, too.