It's good to hear that some good news is coming out of Albuquerque for once. After the incident happened, were I in the US I may well have been part of the protests that shut down the city council </internet tough guy>.
On the one hand, if I squint I can understand the trigger-happy attitude of the police. ABQ has more than its fair share of violent crime, and I recall hearing about criminal shootings on the news basically once a month. It's a dangerous beat.
That said, the only time I've had a gun pulled on me was when a cop thought I was breaking into a car (fun fact! I was having a breakdown and was crying on the side of the car. It was a fun night). APD over the last few years killed a higher-than-average number of people. And frankly, the types of people who went into the force whom I knew before going into the force aren't the types of people I'd trust to protect and serve without fairly rigid oversight and robust conflict de-escalation training, neither of which that doesn't existed at the time of this incident. I only hope that the DoJ investigation actually changed things, and at the very least I'm glad that the cops are facing some consequences.
Part of me can't help but think that they wouldn't be had James Boyd been Hispanic, though. Or, god forbid, Black.
