News & Commentary

Elisha Lucero had long suffered from persistent and intense migraine headaches, but it wasn’t until her car wreck she learned the true cause.

The death of Elisha Lucero at the hands of BCSO deputies in 2019 was both tragic and preventable. Lucero, 28, was killed on July 21, 2019 when Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) deputies shot her 21 times. BCSO deputies were responding to a 911 call from family members who were concerned about her mental health and safety.

Computer programs that crunch data from arrest reports, court records, even social media accounts, and then spit out predictions about future crimes to stop them before they happen, promise to have policing down to a science. But hidden in the blind spots of these data-crunching algorithms lay numerous civil liberties concerns.

As renowned Native American artist Mateo Romero drove along Old Santa Fe Trail on a hot July day, he couldn’t have imagined that he’d soon be lying face down on the ground with a rifle pointed at his head.

As teenage brothers Thomas and Lloyd descended a staircase with fellow prospective students of Colorado State University, the excitement of visiting their dream school quickly unraveled.

By the third time Sherese Crawford got pulled over, she knew it was no matter of coincidence.

On Friday, September 22, a group of several hundred people in Albuquerque peacefully marched downtown to protest police brutality against people of color in America. Though the event was planned well in advance, the timing couldn’t have been more appropriate. Just a few days earlier, yet another a white police officer was acquitted in the killing of a black motorist in St. Louis. When Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists protested the acquittal, St. Louis police in riot gear forcibly dispersed the protesters while mocking them with chants of, “Whose streets? Our streets!”—a co-opting of an iconic BLM slogan that emerged out the Ferguson protests three years earlier.

Robby Heckman, like many ACLU volunteers, experienced something in his personal life that shook him to the core and drove him to action.

Douglas lost his freedom because he lacked the money to post bond. He lost list life because Cibola County Detention Center didn’t think his life was worth the cost of a hospital bill.