Albuquerque Police Advisory Board
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Donald Jeffries was a member of the Albuquerque Police Advisory Board [APAB] from 1980 through 1981. He served as Co-Vice Chairman of the Board from January - August, 1980, and then was Chairman of the Board until his resignation in August 1981. As Chair, he launched a number of activist initiatives for the APAB, which had been promulgated by the Albuquerque City Council in 1978 in response to alleged police brutality. Originally, the Board was staffed by ex-police officers and others who were more or less willing to rubber stamp police department policies. In 1979, though, David Rusk was elected mayor of the City of Albuquerque. He appointed Donald Jeffries as a member at-large of the APAB, along with a number of other more liberal and activist members. The new mayor’s mandate to the Board was to encourage healing in police-community relations. Mr. Jeffries, in his roles as Vice Chairman, and then Chairman, stressed the neutrality of the APAB, and made it clear that the Board would not continue to be a rubber stamp for police policies, but would instead serve as a liaison between the public and the police department.
In 1980, just as Donald was becoming a member of the Board, Phil Chacon, an officer in the Albuquerque Police Department [APD], had been killed in the line of duty. Unconfirmed reports had stated the killer was an African American male. Even though Phil Chacon was an officer who made it his professional duty to create positive relations with the African American community in Albuquerque, the department’s response to his murder was to go out and harass African American citizens (about 5% of the total population of Albuquerque) in an apparent effort to ‘produce’ a suspect for the murder. The department’s public behavior was extremely offensive to the black citizenry (as well as many other citizens who were concerned about civil rights’ issues), with police at roadblocks pointing guns at citizens [there were published photos in the Albuquerque Journal with these images] and forcing 60-year old African American men and women to lie spread-eagle in the street with shotguns to the heads. The violation of their civil rights was egregious, plus it promoted a poor public image of police activities.
As co-Vice Chairman of the APAB, Donald met with the Albuquerque Police Chief E.L. “Whitey” Hansen, and expressed the concerns of the Board. Chief Hansen agreed to draft guidelines concerning how the department should respond when an officer is killed in the line of duty, with an emphasis on the maintenance of good police-community relations in a time of high anxiety for the police force; and how to ensure that the civil rights of citizens, especially African American citizens, could be better respected. Chief Hansen agreed to have these guidelines drafted and promulgated by May 1981.
Very early in his tenure on the Board, Donald suggested to the other members that meeting in the police department conference room was far too ‘limiting’, in that in order to maintain positive police-community relations and to allow the ‘process’ to be transparent to the citizens, it would be a positive adjustment to begin having two meetings a month, one an administrative process and planning meeting at the police department’s conference room and a second one in a community location (preferably a City of Albuquerque community center). Only in this manner would the citizens be willing to view the Board as a relevant liaison that would listen to their concerns about police behavior.
While the Board thought it a good idea, several of the members who had joined the Board when it was first formed in 1978 and who largely had joined when the Board did little except ‘rubber stamp’ police policies, resigned almost immediately after this new policy was instituted, because they simply viewed the policy as requiring too much work and too many meetings. From Donald’s (and that of the incoming Mayor, David Rusk) viewpoint, that was actually an advantage, since the members who were resigning were fairly conservative. Donald suggested, and Mayor Rusk agreed, to appoint liberal, activist members in their place.
The APAB began to engage in these kinds of community meetings in the autumn of 1980. Though there were some initial public relations snafus, eventually the process ‘settled out’. When at first the police minimized the role of the Board and denied responsibility for their professional behavior (“the problem is the courts and the attorneys”), the APAB complained to Chief Hansen. Very respectfully, the Chief agreed, in return, to begin to attend the meetings himself. He did this and when the citizens expressed concerns, he stated he would look into the concerns himself and respond to the citizens - most commendable!
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