The "Good" Cops of Albuquerque have been allegedly editing/deleting parts of officer shooting vids…

Albuquerque Police Department allegedly edited or deleted parts of officer shooting videos

The Albuquerque Police Department edited or deleted videos of some of its most controversial incidents in recent years, including at least two officer-involved shootings, its former records supervisor has alleged.

A sworn affidavit from ex-employee Reynaldo Chavez says the police department for New Mexico’s largest city was “erasing, altering, corrupting and/or encrypting” some of its most contentious videos, and ordering employees to indefinitely delay requests for their release.

Those videos included clips of the fatal shootings of Mary Hawkes, a 19-year-old car thief suspect killed in 2015, and of Jeremy Robertson, a law enforcement informant who ran away from detectives after a failed arrest attempt in 2014.

The affidavit, obtained by New Mexico In Depth, emerged last week as part of a civil rights lawsuit from Hawkes’ family against the City of Albuquerque and its police department. The city has thus far refused to release requested records that could show any changes made to the videos of Hawkes’ death.

Chavez joined the department in 2011 and eventually became the supervisor of its records department. He was placed on leave last year for alleged unprofessional conduct, and ultimately fired. He filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the city in January, claiming he was fired for raising issues with his boss' orders to tamper with footage.

According to the affidavit, Chavez learned that the head of the department’s Criminal Forensic Unit, Frank Pezzano, was erasing or editing body cam footage from some of the city’s most scrutinized cases, including the Hawkes shootings. Chavez reported Pezzano, but soon learned that others in his chain of command did the same things. The department’s public information offices and forensic workers were being trained to edit videos “so that they were either not usable or altered,” Chavez said.

The cameras from three officers captured the fatal shootings of Hawkes. But Chavez said one of the videos had been “altered by changing the gradient of the resolution on the video.” The second video had been rendered “blurry or unclear.” Twenty seconds of the third officers’ video were deleted.

Chavez also alleges that surveillance footage from a salon showing the shooting of Robertson had been deleted.

“I can see the salon video has the tell-tale signs that it has been altered and images that had been captured are now deleted,” Chavez said in the affidavit.

“One of the deleted images captured the officers shooting Jeremy Robertson.”

The department has not commented on Chavez’s accusations.