ALBUQUERQUE — To raise awareness about the rising incidents of violent juvenile crime and to put pressure on lawmakers to start addressing the issue, several top law enforcement officers on July 15, addressed the situation, including Española City Police Chief Mizel Garcia.
Brought together at the behest of Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman, who is running for governor, the officers discussed local cases from across the state, including Española.
“The unique perspective I bring is that I retired from the Albuquerque Police Department after approximately 27 years,” Garcia said. “I’ve been the chief in Española for the last three years now. What I realized, and the unique perspective that I have, is that I know now that violent juvenile crime is not an aberration or an anomaly. It doesn’t only happen in a county like Bernalillo where we have 670,000 people. It doesn’t happen in the city of Las Cruces only, with a population of almost 120,000. It doesn’t happen in a city of Farmington, which has 45,000.”
No, Garcia said, it hits home.
“It also happens in the city of Española, which has 10,500,” he said. “So this shows you how this problem is statewide.”
And it’s one that’s getting worse, Bregman said, without much relief from those who can help.
Legislators “have been tone deaf to the crisis on the ground,” he said. “One of our proposals last year included tougher penalties if you sell or transfer a firearm to a minor. That seems so reasonable to me. That bill didn’t even get a hearing in a 60-day session. Didn’t even get one hearing in a 60-day session.”
That, Garcia added, is something that needs to change.
“We’ve talked about accountability,” he said. “I think what DA Bregman is talking about is appropriateness, and we need to define that term so that it is an effective term. When you were using it in addressing violent juvenile crime, we have to realize that appropriate judicial consequences, or accountability, are overall if we don’t do that, it’s detrimental to the juveniles who are committing these crimes.”
The idea is not necessarily to jail juveniles and forget about them, he said, but to help them become better citizens.
“We’re looking to be able to assist these juveniles when we can,” Garcia said. “We’re looking for the treatment programs. We’re looking for rehabilitation. We’re looking for those things that are available, and they’re very limited. They’re very limited. Let me tell you, coming from Española, I can tell you how limited the resources are.”
And often, it’s the small towns where this crime is happening that gets overlooked, Garcia said.
“I was so grateful for the DA to call and say, ‘Do you want to come to Albuquerque and talk about what’s going on in Española?’ Of course, I do,” he said. “We don’t have a platform like this very often. What we need to realize also is that juvenile crimes, they have a lasting effect, not only on the juvenile, but on their families, especially on the victims. I believe one of the chiefs, I believe the sheriff, brought that up, where are the rights of our victims? What about the emotional and the physical and financial burdens that they receive as a result of this?”
Garcia showed some photos of a couple of teenagers shooting in an Española parking lot.
“This was a case where we had two 15-year olds armed with rifles that went to our homeless shelter,” he said. “They stood over it, and thank goodness that shelter, the parking lot had been cleared. We had 30 to 40 tents there, with approximately 60 people there. On the night that these juveniles went, there were maybe nine to 16 people there. They fired rounds over the heads for no apparent reason. They fired rounds over the heads of these homeless people who were sleeping in the parking lot and we ended up arresting them. There was no purpose for doing it. They just wanted to go out and do it.”
In another case, several teenagers randomly attacked a man outside a local grocery.
“They found another gentleman and forgive me for using this term, but this is the term that they utilized, they found a male subject, and they curb stomped him. They put him on the ground, and they kicked his face into the curb,” Garcia said. “But that wasn’t enough. They pulled out the AR rifle they had, and they butt-stroked the subject to the point where his eyeball was hanging out of his head.”
Things have simply gotten out of hand and changes need to be made, Garcia pointed out.
“To me, this is probably the most important thing up to this point in my career,” he said. “We have to get this message out. We have to be able to discuss it at the table. What can we do, not only for the rest of our community, but for these children, for these juveniles? We need to make that decision.”