Welcome back. Off we go to the merry month of December.

Well, not so merry for ABQ Mayor Tim Keller and his crime-challenged APD Chief Mike Geier. The news that dropped on the first day of December revealing that an optimistic set of city crime stats were botched was equivalent to the proverbial lump of coal in their Christmas stockings.

Actually it was worse than that.

The news came on the exact day the Mayor was marking his second anniversary as the city's chief executive. Drop another lump of coal in that stocking.

Keller is in over his ankles in the city's crime quicksand and his kneecaps could be next. In the old days they called what happened with the crime stats a "credibility gap." Credibility is still the currency of leadership and the administration--caged with a police department that seemingly cannot be tamed--continues to see it shredded.

The apologetic city PR mavens awkwardly blamed the bum numbers on lousy software and a staff shortage in the records center. The assertions that they were doctored or designed to deceive the public was left to the social media aficionados. They did not disappoint. Caryn McGinley wrote:

What’s even more alarming is the fact that it took someone to notice inconsistencies and to ask questions for this to be reported to the public. They had the correct data at the end of September, and yet we’re only hearing about it now. They chose not to hold a news conference about crime statistics for the third quarter and while APD provided the revised statistics to City Council in October, they did not disclose the change in numbers. Does this not seem deceptive?

The Alligators warned here when the big crime drop was reported for the first six months of '19 compared to '18 that the news should be received with caution. They said the Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics reported to the FBI could tell a different tale. And that's just what happened.

Geier and Keller

It's not as though crime did not go down some during that time. The Mayor made that point in response to the revelation of the botched numbers. That's the same hook that commenter Michael Garcia made on Facebook:

APD and the mayor never reported or stated that violent crime is down. In fact, he has stated that violent crime is a huge problem, and he is doing what he can as mayor to try to curb it. He has previously stated that property crime was down. And here, the ABQ Journal reports by its own investigations, indeed it is down. This is nothing new, nothing revelatory. It's a typical rightward leaning paper, gotcha story. There's nothing mistaken about reporting crime is down, and the Journal is reporting that crime is down but not by quite as much. . . 

Crime is indeed down, but you don't need a degree from the Columbia School of Journalism to know that this is a straight forward story and not a production of Steve Bannon. A dramatic drop in crime or a modest one is a major difference for the lives of thousands of crime victims as well as for measuring progress the city is making in halting the epidemic.

Not to mention a measurement of the city's competence and integrity as questions now swirl over other APD crimes stats.

APD misinformation has a long, long history. We recently reported how the city council and APD could not agree on how many officers were charged with enforcing the federal consent decree, instead of being out on the streets on the crime beat. Now this.

Before the consent decree the cops were shooting left and right and the city paid up something like $70 million in lawsuit settlements. Now millions go out the door annually to pay for consent decree enforcement. Then there's the 2018 tax increase the mayor and council approved for APD that brings in some $60 million a year.

At APD the truth is still looking for a friend. It's a very expensive search for taxpayers and a politically perilous one for the Mayor and his Chief of Police.

CRIME BEAT

City Hall watcher Art Tannenbaum questions the numerous crime fighting plans from the city:

People have been asking why some of the things announced about crime-fighting haven't been done already. For example, why has APD now just begun the "Metro 15" plan, targeting the most violent offenders? Why is an APD staffing analysis being asked for by the union leader only now, in what seems to be an afterthought to the "public safety" tax imposed last year? As long as everybody involved has somebody else to blame and the money keeps flowing regardless of unacceptable outcomes, nothing will really change. These politicos ought to be thanking the public for our extraordinary tolerance.

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(c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2019