Vote For Your Future, Not Fear

Accountability for a district attorney runs through the same mechanism that's supposed to work for everyone else. Voters. That's it. That's the whole apparatus. Which is why it matters enormously who is and isn't allowed to be one.

Who the performance is for, and who pays

Bregman isn't solving murders. Albuquerque's violent crime resolution rate is public and it sits near the bottom among comparable American cities. The APD federal consent decree is largely worked through and isn't the live story anymore. The live story starts in 2008, when a defense attorney and a private investigator built what federal prosecutors have called a criminal enterprise: officers paid in cash and hotel stays to skip court dates and lose paperwork so DWI cases collapsed, guilty and innocent defendants alike, with senior corrupt officers taking referral fees for recruiting junior ones. It never sat inside one department. At least thirteen officers across APD and the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office have been named, New Mexico State Police implicated alongside them, and 340-plus DWI cases already formally dismissed. That figure counts DWI stops only. It was never the real number. Criminal Legal News, Shakedown in New Mexico.

Those are the actual job performance numbers of the man asking you to concentrate on juvenile shoplifters.

The real number is every file any of those officers ever put a hand on. Traffic stops, detective work, testimony in somebody else's trial, evidence logged, arrests unrelated to any DWI. Giglio v. United States is the mechanism: once an officer's credibility is impeachable, everything he touched is tainted, whether it ended in conviction or dismissal. Patrol, detectives, deputies, state police, three agencies, about two decades of caseload. Thousands, not hundreds. Every one of those defendants has grounds to file.

Defense attorneys are stacking a second argument on top. Two cases with matching fact patterns that fell on opposite sides of the scandal's boundary, one dismissed and one not, is a due process problem in itself. Weaker than the first argument, in my read. Being made anyway, and it'll keep being made until somebody actually counts.

His office sat on tips from 2022 and moved only after the federal government did the work. It took a January 2024 letter from the U.S. Attorney's Office, spelling out his own Giglio exposure, before any of it registered as an emergency. ABQ RAW, U.S. Attorney letter to DA Bregman.

What a facility actually teaches

You are not taught life skills in a juvenile facility. You are taught that you are defective. A problem. A monster. An animal. A "super predator" – Hillary Clinton's contribution to this conversation, a phrase she used to describe children who were already being ground up by the system she was performing for. I hope she lives a long time. I also hope she has a non-terminal aneurysm – not fatal, just enough that she's in diapers with half her face not working, with nothing to do but think about what she said about children who were already being destroyed by the system she was performing for.

That is more of a wish than a policy position. But I spent six months in solitary as a child, so I'm allowed.

Nobody teaches you that what was done to you is the problem. They teach you that you are. Then the gate opens and you walk out with that as your floor. No skills, a record that surfaces everywhere it counts, an employer screening you out, a neighborhood already briefed that you're a predator.

And then that kid has kids of his own, raised out of what the building put in him, because that's the material he was left with. The same office processes the second generation and cites them as proof the first punishment was too gentle. That's the loop. It has run long enough to name the hands that stayed on it.

Names, in order

It starts in 1977, at a Senate hearing on school busing, where a senator from Delaware named the thing he was afraid of and used his own children to do it.

"Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point." Snopes, correct attribution.

A jungle is a place with things living in it. He left that noun unsaid and never came back for it.

The following decade supplied it, in statute rather than in adjectives. 1984: a bill written alongside Strom Thurmond and the Reagan administration, the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, expanding civil asset forfeiture. 1986: co-sponsorship of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which manufactured fresh mandatory minimums and set the crack-to-powder sentencing ratio at one hundred to one. One chemical, two populations, a hundredfold gap in the price. 1988: another Anti-Drug Abuse Act, harder mandatory minimums, stiffer transport penalties, and a brand new drug czar's office. The Appeal, on the legislative record.

By 1989 a Republican president delivered a national address on drugs and got told from the other side of the aisle that he'd gone soft.

"Quite frankly, the president's plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand. In a nutshell, the president's plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time."

The objection to a Reagan-Bush drug war was that it lacked cops, prosecutors, judges, and cells. Nothing else is in there. Read it twice and it stays empty.

1993 is where the rhetoric finally matched the statutes. Same man, Senate floor, arguing the crime bill, describing the exact children this series concerns. "We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created." A "cadre of young people, tens of thousands of them, born out of wedlock, without parents, without supervision, without any structure, without any conscience developing because they literally have not been socialized." Then sentence: "They are beyond the pale many of those people, beyond the pale. We have no choice but to take them out of society."

He also threw out the causes he'd just listed. "I don't care why someone is a malefactor in society." And he specified whose safety the wall served, by relation: whether or not they're about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. CNN, on the 1993 speech.

Sixteen years between those two, and the geometry never moves. His family inside, the jungle outside. In 1977 the worry is what his kids grow up surrounded by. In 1993 the worry is what comes through the door for his mother and his sons. The threat is a category of person both times, and both times he's positioned between that category and his own household.

Set the 1993 lines beside each other. Neglect made them. He doesn't care why. Same speech, same breath, no apparent difficulty. That isn't an oversight, it's the doctrine compressed: name the cause, then rule it out of scope, because a cause costs appropriations and an irrelevance costs only concrete.

Bill passed 1994. Two years later a New Hampshire speech put superpredator into the language. A year after that, Justice Department roundtables on juvenile crime while Congress moved transfer legislation. The cadre went into buildings.

Forty-seven years past the jungle, the other end of it arrives.

June 2024: that senator's son convicted on three federal felonies for buying a revolver in 2018 while smoking crack. Two counts of false statements on the ATF form, one count under 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(3), possession by an unlawful user of a controlled substance. A prohibited person charge, the same family of federal count police departments are right now lobbying U.S. Attorneys to bring against teenagers. What convicted him was largely his own memoir, where he'd written about the crack. Exposure ran to twenty-five years. The Trace, on the case.

His father pardoned him on December 1, 2024, ahead of sentencing.

Roughly 120 federal charges a year came under that statute on average from fiscal 2008 through 2017. Alexander Ledvina, picked up at twenty-six as a marijuana user, drew fifty-one months. LaVance LeMarr Cooper drew thirty-seven. Abyehun Teferi drew eighteen for marijuana at a shooting range. Reason, on the comparison.

Not one of them received a pardon. The power was spent exactly once on that offense, on the son of the man who authored the mandatory minimums, stood up the drug czar, called a Republican drug war insufficiently harsh, and announced from the Senate floor that he didn't care why.

He cared why when it was his. The addiction mattered, the circumstances mattered, the memoir mattered, the entire shape of the life mattered. He'd had that vocabulary available for decades. He simply never spent any of it outside his own house.

Which is this series, argued for me by the men who drafted the statutes. Nobody ever doubted the system can weigh circumstance, background, addiction, and the shape a life got carved into. It performs that weighing thoroughly and patiently, on every occasion the person in the chair belongs to somebody.

The chain runs from a 1977 busing hearing to a forfeiture statute to a hundred-to-one disparity to a drug czar to a crime bill to a superpredator speech to a pardon to a mayor's crime initiative built around a worst-of-the-worst list, and it terminates on a district attorney in Albuquerque requesting thirty-six ways to move more children into adult court. I'm not connecting the dots for anybody. They connect themselves, and they come in one color.

Why children specifically

The calculation is rational, which is the ugly part. Juvenile defendants can't vote. Their families are disproportionately poor, disproportionately brown, and disproportionately already locked out of political power. The voters who reward tough-on-crime messaging are not the voters whose kids go through the pipeline. They're the voters whose kids get diversion, second chances, and records that quietly vanish.

Children are the ideal target. Visible enough for headlines. Powerless enough to generate no consequences. No money, no lawyers worth naming, no connections, no ballots.

So, a question for Sam Bregman that nobody else should answer on his behalf. Why does a career police officer, who your own office's dismissals establish is also a career criminal, receive more deference, more patience, more careful consideration of what might have led a trained professional astray, than a fourteen-year-old does? He gets the plea and the quiet retirement. The kid raised in the conditions documented in Part 3 gets "superpredator." One office. One system. Answer it in public, before the next election.

Worth adding, from the room rather than the record: prosecutors in that office walk into hearings holding empty files and read aloud from what sounds like a finished document. Ask for the copy you're entitled to before the hearing for anything they mean to use against you, and you're told they were quoting from an unfinished draft. It's a delay tactic, and it works because nobody names it out loud every single time.

The case I know best

I got out.

Life sentence, appealed and reduced to nineteen years. Four years served from arrest to release, to the day. Ten years of parole after. Roughly one of those four years was solitary: seven consecutive months in year one, then thirty and sixty day stretches across the following three. My son died while I was inside. I earned a GED. I qualified as a paralegal. I taught Adult Basic Education. I became a minister, and I left Christianity when my son died. I became an imam.

What changed the trajectory on parole was one person. A parole officer who'd been a social worker before that. She made calls to recruiters. She produced the jobs that turned into an IT career. That's not a metaphor. It's the working demonstration of every intervention Part 3 documents and Bregman declines to fund. One person treating reintegration as the actual objective is why I'm not a line in a recidivism table.

My cellmate robbed a store too. Both of us did. His became a homicide because he was high and frightened and the clerk fought back, having noticed he was a kid, and the gun discharged. Mine stayed a robbery. He received less time than I did and served more of it. The distance between our two lives is mostly one trigger and a run of appeals. Not character. Not merit. I lost track of him after we stopped sharing a cell. What I know is that the luck that moved my appeal and assigned that parole officer to my file had nothing to do with any decision I made.

There's a judge whose shoplifting arrest at seventeen got written off as follies of youth on the way to a career and a seat on the bench, and she's still inside the system deciding which children get that reading. She shoplifted. I robbed a store. I got the maximum, with enhancements applied for my trauma history. She got a judgeship. The crime was not the variable.

Most kids get the other reading.

The questions

For anyone voting in Bernalillo County, this is the list, and none of it is complicated. What is your violent crime resolution rate, measured against comparable cities? What did your office do with the DWI corruption tips it held in 2022, two years before the FBI investigation surfaced publicly? How many cases from the compromised DWI unit has your office independently reviewed, beyond what federal prosecutors forced you to dismiss? Which diversion programs are you funding, and what outcomes have they produced? What is your plan for the conditions that manufacture juvenile crime, as opposed to the children those conditions manufacture?

Not gotcha questions. Baseline competency questions for a district attorney who expects to be taken seriously about public safety.

The children in his pipeline can't ask them. That is precisely and deliberately why they were chosen.

The rest of us can.