Medina and Keller

APD Chief Harold Medina is leaving his job--but there's a catch. The Chief says he won't give up the reins to his controversial reign until December 2025. That just happens to coincide with the end of Mayor Tim Keller's second term in office. 

Keller says he plans to seek a third term next year and with Medina signaling that he will not be around for a third, the plan is obviously to remove the controversial Medina as a campaign issue. 

Well, good luck with that. 

--Medina has become somewhat of an albatross around Keller's neck as the ABQ crime scene settles into permanently higher rates, even though they have dropped from the spiked levels reached during Covid. 

--Then there is the rate of fatal police shootings, higher than ever in modern city history and the highest in the United States. This despite a decade long presence by the Department of Justice to bring that rate down. 

--Add to it the millions spent on a Federal Monitor for APD who has continually ghosted the city without repercussions, collecting his outsized checks but remaining a phantom.

--Then there is Medina's recent bizarre auto accident that critically injured an innocent civilian and brought into questions the Chief's temperament. 

--There are also problems at the City Council with a handful of the lawmakers expressing no faith in Medina but unable to garner a Council majority to approve a no-confidence resolution in the chief.

--There's more. The look the other way mentality when it comes to the huge amount of overtime pay going out the door at APD continues, despite Keller calling out the abuse when he was State Auditor as have other Auditors.

--Keller and company and public officials elsewhere continue to argue that the crime rate is down and that this is a perception problem. But that's only half true. ABQ homicides, for example, are down from the Covid spike but well above the pre-Covid rate.

--The APD DWI scandal that apparently goes back years continued under Medina's watch, a commentary on the checks and balances in the department.

--Also, the nature of crime--not only its frequency--is what raises public alarm.  

--Guns going off at Coronado Mall--the state's largest. 

--Brazen fatal shootings and others in the heart of Downtown. 

--Open air and ubiquitous drug use in the War Zone in the SE Heights. 

--Property crimes that reveal little fear among the city's drug-fueled criminal class. 

MAYOR 2025

Medina has been chief three years and under state retirement rules his high salary as chief--north of $200,000--will be applied to his retirement benefits. He could be eligible for as much as 90 percent of his current pay for the rest of his life. So Medina's decision to retire is not a shocker but as it is often the case with Medina it comes with a political angle, similar to his bobbing and weaving over the fatal police shootings and the ongoing crime wave

Keller may or not get re-elected. We won't know the lay of the land  until those hoping to replace him step forward. But if he fails to win again his decision to keep Medina will not be a fatal error. That would have happened soon after he took office in 2017 and promised a national search for a chief but ended up picking one from within the culturally dysfunctional APD. That pick didn't last but the culture did.

Medina has lasted but so has the lack of progress in reforming APD exemplified by the DWI scandal and the crime rate which can be partially explained by the pandemic but not fully. Medina or no Medina that will be key to determining the outcome of next year's mayoral election. 

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