II. Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation for the help we received from many people in Albuquerque. Everyone we met was gracious, cooperative, and helpful.

Our immediate employer was the City Council of Albuquerque. The staff of Council Services, led by Mark Sanchez, were extremely helpful. Their efforts included obtaining official documents, arranging meetings with members of City Council and others, and suggesting the names of people we should contact.

The Albuquerque Police Department was completely open and cooperative. We would like to express special appreciation to Chief Joseph Polisar for establishing a degree of openness that can serve as a national model. As he stated at a PSAB meeting, every door was open at the police department. The complaint files of the Internal Affairs unit were fully available to us, subject only to a confidentiality agreement we negotiated with the City Attorney. Captain Carl Ross and Lieutenant William Weiland answered every question and provided every document we requested. Few police departments in this country have ever granted such complete access to a team of independent investigators.

One part of our evaluation involved a survey of the perceptions and attitudes of APD officers. Chief Polisar cooperated fully with this effort. Under the direction of Deputy Chief Tim Bourgoine, the APD arranged a special City Wide Briefing for the purposes of administering the questionnaires. This involved a certain amount of disruption of the normal routine of operations in the APD. We would like to express our enormous appreciation for the cooperation of Chief Polisar, Deputy Chief Bourgoine, and other members of the APD command staff in this regard. We would also like to thank the staff of the Training Academy for being very gracious hosts at the Briefings.

During the course of administering the surveys we had an opportunity to talk informally with a number of APD officers. These conversations gave us additional insight into the operations of the APD. We would like to thank all of those officers who took the time to talk with us.

Many people in the community assisted us in our study. A number of people went to great lengths to put us in contact with other people and/or to organize meetings with groups. We are extremely grateful to them. Many of these people shared their experiences and impressions about the APD and the oversight mechanisms. For some of these individuals the experience of talking with us was extremely painful as it brought back extremely unpleasant memories of their own experiences or the experience of members of their family. We wish to thank those people for making the difficult effort of talking with us.

Because we want to respect the confidentiality of their observations, we have chosen not to mention individuals by name. We hope that no one feels slighted by not being mentioned. Given the sensitivity of the subject, however, we felt that a general policy of confidentiality was the best course of action.