Albuquerque Police Department
Racial discrimination claims against Hobbs Police draw unexpected rebuttal
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James Ginger / Courtesy of New Mexico PBS
Shannon Kennedy was “shocked” when she came across a document filed by the defense for the Hobbs Police Department while preparing for a sweeping civil rights trial focused on allegations of racist policing. The well-known Albuquerque lawyer and her partners had hired a police practices expert and a demographer to investigate claims by three former Hobbs Police Department officers, their clients, that department brass pushed them out for raising concerns about targeting black and Hispanic communities.
The demographer produced a detailed, 15-page report that showed Hobbs PD made a majority of “pedestrian stops” in the city’s heavily black and Hispanic south end and that non-whites were far more likely to find themselves detained by officers in such stops. The demographer’s report, which relied on population mapping and data analysis, was dated July 30, 2019. A few months later, lawyers representing the city of Hobbs, which has a documented history of discriminatory policing, hired its own expert to produce a report on “the perceived issues in the case.” The resulting two-and-a-half-page document says simply the methodology used by the plaintiffs’ demographer — examining stop, detention and arrest rates in certain locations — is “an ineffective and flawed measure” of policing. The report does not address the demographer’s findings.