The District Attorney’s Office in Bernalillo County announced on Monday that it is now caught up entirely on the backlog of police shooting cases while continuing to look for additional special prosecutors to prevent the system from bogging down again.
Before all of the cases within the backlog had been addressed, the special prosecutors in the DA's office had been closing cases that dated all the way back to 2013, according to KRQE.
“You’re looking back in time trying to recreate what happened, people move, witnesses move. You want to talk to somebody at OMI. Sometimes, they’re gone. Often they’ve moved on to another job,” special prosecutor Michael Cox told the station. “If we could find two or three (more prosecutors) it would be fine. That would give us five, basically. That’s enough to keep up with what’s coming in.”
Within all of the backlogged cases, special prosecutors found a total of 36 shootings that involved at least one member of the Albuquerque Police Department, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office, or the U.S. Marshals Service, according to KRQE.
In order to tackle the backlogged cases, the DA’s office had tripled its number of special prosecutors in 2017 with the sole purpose of addressing all of the cases, which took about two years total. Now, the Bernalillo County DA's office is hoping to double the number of special prosecutors for the current caseload it is handling in order to prevent future backlogs.