New Mexico governor mobilizes National Guard to tackle crime emergency in Albuquerque

I briefly attended high school in Albuquerque during the early 90s as my family deliberated on whether we wanted to live there (we ultimately didn’t). When I started making friends, I was quickly warned about looking people in the eyes, lest they interpret the action as “mad dogging” them and respond with suitable hostility. It sounded like something I would have heard on a show about prison life on HBO and I wondered if I had actually been sent to a penitentiary instead of a place for learning. A student had been fatally shot in the parking lot of the high school the year before I arrived by another student. Our school was broken into and vandalized by members of a rival school not long after I started there.

I am not the least bit surprised to read this news.