Medina: water is wet!

By Dan Klein and Dennis Domrzalski

Interim Police Chief Harold Medina should just shut up and go away.

Really, he should. Because every time he opens his mouth he sounds dumber and dumber. Based on his recent interviews with TV people, we're figuring that Medina will soon call a news conference outside of APD headquarters to breathlessly announce that he has just discovered that water is wet, wheels are round and that it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

Really, that's where this guy is headed.

In a recent interview with KOB TV, Medina said that crime is related to drugs and the COVID virus. To combat crime, Medina said that he has started having daily morning meetings with his staff.

"One of the things that I've implemented as interim chief is we have an 8:45 call every morning that includes all the commanders, all the deputy chiefs, and we discuss what occurred the previous 24 hours," Medina told the interviewer. "I even created a new process where we get a 24-hour overall crime report broken down by area command."

The 8:45 call every morning with commanders and deputy chiefs, do you know what those are called? They're called daily briefings. It's something good police departments have been doing for, well, at least a hundred years. And, yes, APD has been having them for decades. If APD stopped doing them recently we'd like to know why.

Daily briefings with his staff? Wow, that's a earth-shattering revelation. Thank you, Harold, for saving us! And how about the 24-hour crime data meeting Medina talks about? Yeah, well Jerry Galvin was doing that at APD back in 1997 when he was chief here.

If they wanted to be real reporters, KOB's people would find someone to rebut Medina's idiotic and inane comments. That wouldn't be hard to do because, well, his comments are really beyond dumb. To just let him babble on and on is incompetent and immoral. If Medina proclaimed that he just discovered that the sun rises in the east, would they not challenge him on it? Actually, probably not.

Let's be brutally honest here. Medina is treating all of us like we're idiots. This guy has been with APD since 1995 and has been 1st deputy chief since 2017. Wasn’t he doing daily briefings with his people back then? If not, he should be fired. He is out of ideas and we need to move beyond him. Look at it this way, if your car's Check Engine light was on and your mechanic couldn't find the problem, you would take it to another mechanic. Albuquerque's crime problem is that Check Engine light. Medina has tried and failed. We need a new chief.

And remember, people: salt is salty.