2026.07.09_Bench Trial Report
On May 29th, three members of Revolutionary Action New Mexico, then Dare to Struggle New Mexico, were arrested for exposing APD’s crimes at the scene of their second murder and third shooting in just over a week. On May 26th, APD murdered Jose Armas at his home during a mental health crisis. Three days later, they shot and killed Robert Salas after cornering him in a vacant parking lot following a trespassing call.
We were arrested because we demanded answers about the latest APD killing and refused to back down. We stood with the people who had witnessed the crime and spread the word to people passing by. We were arrested in a blatant act of political repression (the cops were trying to shut us up) but we were charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and misdemeanor larceny.
On July 9th, one of our people had their first bench trial for the trumped up charges. When we arrived at the courthouse and checked in with the public defender, she thought that the arresting officer wouldn’t show. Just before the 10am start time, the officer joined over zoom from his cop car.
As the judge quickly ran through a docket of mostly traffic violations, we realized that the dozen or so people who were called before us lacked representation (standard for traffic citations, not other misdemeanors), and had been sent to a zoom breakout room with their respective arresting officers to sort out the details of the case. By the time their names were called and their case presented to the judge, a number of significant decisions had already been made—almost entirely by the cop—over zoom. At this point, the judge confirmed that the defendant understood the terms as outlined by the officer, without question.
When our time came, we were taken into a separate room, where our lawyer was also in a breakout room with the arresting officer. She laid out the terms of his offer: either plead guilty to resisting arrest, or accept a 90-day PAD (Pre-Adjudication Diversion), essentially a plea deal. No prosecutor was present; the terms offered to us were based entirely on the personal discretion of the arresting officer, who is not a lawyer, has a clear conflict of interest and, in this particular case, had a bone to pick. The arbitrary, vindictive, and deeply personal nature of this policy came into further focus when, just a few minutes later, the public defender interrupted our private conversation to inform us that the officer had just decided to tack on 24 hours of community service to his bullshit deal. No justification was given; it’s clear that this pig simply got bored and impatient while waiting in his car and decided that spitballing new punishments was a good use of his time on the clock. This is the same cop (one of multiple) who used Google AI to determine our charges after arresting us and throwing us in the back of a police car.
What we saw in court is just one jurisdiction-specific expression of the police’s immense power. Though the police work closely with prosecutors in every jurisdiction across the country, in New Mexico and eight other states, arresting officers have been vested with an even greater level of legal discretion usually reserved for practicing attorneys: the discretion to dictate the terms of a plea deal. In New Mexico, the police are allowed to act as de facto prosecutors throughout the entire misdemeanor process—from a defendant’s first appearance through a plea or trial. Not only do these officers determine charges at the time of arrest, they then decide whether to actually pursue those charges, and what options to offer defendants in court.
Because the prosecuting pig is often the same as the arresting officer, officers accused of police brutality, false arrest, or other violations of an arrestee’s rights can suppress those allegations by trumping up criminal charges. Filing inflated or fabricated charges is often an officer’s best protection against civil litigation by the arrestee, internal review of the alleged misconduct, or media scrutiny. In our case, it makes complete sense that APD pigs, who were already on their back foot after a string of shootings and were actively scrambling to cover up another murder, would try to go on the offensive against protesters to deflect attention from their crimes. Getting trumped up charges to stick is also a great way for officers with personal aspirations of being promoted to climb the ranks in their department. It would come as no surprise if this department plagued by one scandal after another generously rewarded cops for getting protestors who exposed them thrown in jail. We’ll be looking out for APD’s next few ‘pigs of the month’ to see if officers Petit-Faubert, Urban, and Rodriguez make the list.
That police officers with clear conflicts of interest, no legal training, and no binding code of legal ethics (the baseline for prosecutors, though we are under no illusions that they adhere to them) can prosecute their own arrests should shatter any remaining illusions about the judicial system being a bulwark against police abuse of power. And though harassing people most oppressed by this system have largely discarded the illusion of a meaningful ‘separation of powers’ between the police and the judiciary, it is this very illusion that keeps the system’s legitimacy intact more broadly. No matter that keeping cops out of judicial functions, ie. deciding on guilt and punishment, is a widely agreed-upon and oft-touted ethical and legal construct; the reality is that police exert influence over these decisions. Even in places where police can’t act directly as prosecutors, they still consult with prosecutors behind closed doors, especially when it comes to pleas. In a legal system where 90-95% of cases are resolved with plea deals, the cumulative effect of the police dictating these pleas—both formally and informally—is immense.
This legal context should also help us understand the totalizing control that police try to exert over the most oppressed people in Albuquerque, especially homeless people living in the War Zone. Every day along Central, the pigs decide where people can sit, if they can keep their belongings, whether they’ll spend the night in jail just for existing outside. We know from talking to people in the War Zone that “shit’s personal”—many of the cops who regularly patrol the area know faces and names, target people they have petty beef with, and cite specific individuals who they know have missed court dates. When people are arrested and go to court (if they’re able to make it there in the first place), they are nearly always forced to come face to face with the same officer who arrested them out on the street. Arresting officers bring all of their vindictiveness from the street into the court room, where they regularly ruin people’s lives by using petty misdemeanors—like citations for sitting on the sidewalk—to dictate plea terms they know are nearly impossible to meet while living on the street.
On the 9th we rejected the cops’ bullshit plea, and on August 27th we’ll back in court for a second bench trial. If the pigs stick to their guns and fail to dismiss the charges, the case will go to trial.
We know APD desperately wants to avoid putting their crimes back in the public eye, and will continue to dangle this plea deal in hopes that we will accept it. It is our responsibility, to all of the people whose lives have been stolen by the police, and to anyone who has spent a lifetime in prison for taking a justified stand against the system, to fight these charges instead of taking the easy way out. Drawing out the enemy, and all their reflexive violence and repression, exposes for all the world to see “just exactly what terms their rule is predicated on—their power to organize violence, our acquiescence.” We may be the ones facing charges, but it is APD’s pigs who are the real criminals.