A Year Before Albuquerque’s Police Corruption Scandal Made Headlines, an Internal Probe Found Nothing
In December 2022, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) received a tip that officers assigned to the APD’s DWI unit were getting paid to make cases disappear. The tipster specifically mentioned Honorio Alba, one of several officers who would later resign amid a burgeoning corruption scandal featuring that very allegation. Yet an internal investigation found no evidence to substantiate the tip.
That episode, recently revealed by City Desk ABQ, helps explain why evidence of longstanding corruption within the DWI unit did not come to light until the FBI began looking into it. “We’re dealing with stuff that we anticipate started decades ago, and we’ve done a lot of things that have got us to this point,” Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina said at a press conference in February. “But we will continue to dig and look and leave no stone unturned and make sure that we get to the bottom of this.”
It seems like the department left plenty of stones unturned when it had a chance to clean its own house before the feds stepped in. Instead of telling the FBI about the alleged corruption, the APD apparently did not take the situation seriously until after it heard from the FBI.
In October 2023, 10 months after the APD’s Criminal Intelligence Unit launched its fruitless probe, the FBI informed Medina that it was investigating the DWI unit. The following month, Albuquerque’s Civilian Police Oversight Agency received a letter from a local court official who said Alba reportedly had pulled over a speeding, flagrantly drunk driver and, instead of filing charges, referred him to a specific local defense attorney.
The FBI investigation became public knowledge after agents executed search warrants at that attorney’s office and the homes of several officers in January 2024. Local news outlets began looking into DWI cases that had been handled by Alba and his colleagues. They found suspiciously low conviction rates that somehow had eluded the APD’s investigators in 2022.
In response to the corruption allegations, the Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office dropped some 200 DWI cases, saying it could not rely on the testimony of the cops who had made the arrests. KOB, the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque, reported that Alba, who was honored as “Officer of the Year” by the New Mexico chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving last July, was the arresting officer in many of those cases.
KRQE, the local CBS affiliate, looked at DWI cases filed during the previous six years. It found that Joshua Montaño, a 19-year veteran, “was named as the officer in at least 36 cases” in which the defendants were represented by Thomas Clear, the lawyer whose office the FBI had searched. Nearly 90 percent of those cases “ended in dismissals.”
City Desk ABQ examined “85 DWI cases dating back to 2017” involving Clear and Alba, Montaño, or two other members of the DWI unit, Harvey Johnson and Nelson Ortiz. It found that 14 percent of the cases ended with trial convictions or plea deals, which was “much lower than the Metro Court average of 56% convictions in DWI cases over the same years.” The other 86 percent were dismissed, typically because officers did not show up at pretrial interviews or hearings. The “vast majority” of the defendants were arrested by Alba
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