The city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, must pay more than $6 million in connection with the wrongful death of a man with schizophrenia killed by Albuquerque police, a judge ruled Tuesday.
The ruling comes as the city of Albuquerque is in talks with the U.S. Justice Department over pending police reforms following a scathing report faulting Albuquerque police for their excessive use of force and the way officers handle suspects battling mental illness.
Albuquerque police officers have been involved in 37 shootings, 23 of them fatal, since 2010. The city’s rate of deadly force rivals that of New York City, according to Micah McCoy with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico. New York City is 15 times larger by population than Albuquerque.
District Court Judge Shannon Bacon said on Tuesday that officers were not acting in self-defense when they punched and shot Christopher Torres, 27, in his backyard in 2011.
Bacon also wrote that the use of deadly force violated Torres' constitutional rights.
According to authorities, Detectives C.J. Brown and Richard Hilger shot Torres in the back at close range while serving an arrest warrant on a felony charge of aggravated auto burglary for trying to carjack a woman at a traffic light. During the confrontation with police, Torres tried to punch Hilger and grabbed his gun as they scuffled in the suspect's backyard, police said.
But Bacon said the officers did not present the arrest warrant when they confronted Torres in his yard. The judge said Hilger and Brown also did not contact Torres' assigned Crisis Intervention Team officer or family before confronting him — something the family had requested in order to ease tensions.
Instead, the officers jumped the fence and walked toward him, the ruling said.
"The unnecessary escalation of events by Detectives Brown and Hilger and their own aggressive acts at the Torres home created the unnecessarily dangerous situation in which Christopher Torres was shot to death," Bacon wrote.
Steve Torres, Christopher's father, said he hadn't seen the ruling, but he thinks it vindicates the family's story that police unnecessarily killed their son.
"For us, it was never about the money," Torres said. "It was about setting the record straight." An attorney for the city of Albuquerque did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Janet Blair, a spokeswoman for Albuquerque police, said there is still a pending civil rights action in federal court, so police Chief Gorden Eden is prohibited from commenting.
The Justice Department is expected to release a draft later this week of a decree on how Albuquerque police must remedy what an April report called their excessive use of force, particularly against the mentally ill and people the report said posed a limited threat.
The report was published shortly after Albuquerque police fatally shot James Boyd, a 38-year-old homeless man armed with a knife, in March.
Boyd's death — captured on video and widely circulated on the Internet — was the Albuquerque Police Department's second fatal shooting in two weeks. It prompted a demonstration by hundreds of people who blocked traffic in the city on March 30. The same day, the hacktivist group Anonymous took down the Police Department’s website for hours.
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