With a downtown hall adorned with pictures of those murdered by the police and protest signs from the many demonstrations, the Albuquerque People’s Tribunal Against Police Brutality jurors heard testimony from dozens of people on police terror in Albuquerque—the city with the highest per capita of police violence in the U.S.
The tribunal was held on the anniversary of the murder of James “Abba” Boyd by Albuquerque P.D., a homeless man who was camping in the foothills. Abba’s brutal murder ignited a new movement against police violence drawing hundreds into the street prior to the national uprising characterized by the Black Lives Matter movement that began after the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
Jurors represented many communities in Albuquerque including Charles Powell and Sally Ellis Thompson from Veterans for Peace, Margeaux Lopez from W.O.R.D. and ANSWER New Mexico, Father Frank Quintana of the Blessed Oscar Romero Catholic Community, Eleanor Chavez, an organizer with A.F.T. Local 1, and Sam Gardipe from the Red Nation and ANSWER New Mexico.
For six months, members of the coalition went out and collected testimony from dozens of victims of police violence and also captured the intimidation that many victims experience from the strong possibility of future reprisals from the police for reporting on police violence and speaking out. The coalition embarked on a People’s Investigation to collect testimony after the Department of Justice investigation failed to identify racial prejudice as a central factor in police murder in Albuquerque.
The findings published by ABQ Justice in a report titled “Targeted: Prejudice and Racial Bias in the Albuquerque Police Department” found that nearly every native person interviewed described APD’s use of racial slurs, such as “dirty Indian.” One homeless Jicarilla Apache man that was interviewed pointed to the ground and said, “This is ours, our land. And the cops they’ll say things like ‘Why do you want to bring the reservation our way?’”
“The problem is colonization. Taking and stealing by force is a fundamental aspect of how all of this relates to Natives,” testified Melanie Yazzie from the Red Nation and member of the Diné nation.
Richard Moore from the Los Jardines Institute who described past people’s tribunals in Albuquerque and testified about the severe repression and assassination by the police of tribunal participants. “They were to appear to testify against police repression and what was going on at the state penitentiary. Our members were killed the day before that testimony was to be given. We need to continue the struggle.”
Activists involved in Tent City defense also testified at the tribunal.
Andrew Nance of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and activist in the Black Lives Matter movement in Los Angeles tied the struggle in Albuquerque into a national context. “The driving force is that people are simply fed up with the brutal racism that confronts Black people and outraged that the murderers of unarmed Black people rarely get sentenced and that reflects the same struggle in poor communities and other communities including Native Americans.”
