Audit raises questions about APD guns

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) - Every officer has one or two and sometimes even more guns depending on their job at the Albuquerque Police Department.

In fact APD has more than 6,000 firearms in its arsenal, which can be a lot to keep track of.

“Historically we’ve done spot checks on all of those things,” said ADP Fiscal Manager Aubrey Thompson.

However, a new audit conducted at the request of APD Administration says that is not good enough.

“They aren’t catching mistakes that they would catch if they did an inventory,” said the Director of Internal Audit Carmen Kavelman.

Mistakes like 14 people with APD issued guns including two firefighters and nine inactive reserve officers which shouldn’t happen.

Auditors said another big problem is that the department does not adequately use it’s master database to see which officers have which guns, instead there are multiple databases.

“If you don’t have one source of truth you’re going to have errors and things are going to be on one database and not on the other, you’re not going to be able to find out when things are missing,” said Kavelman.

The office of internal audit says that opens the department and the city up to serious issues should a gun go missing and fall into the wrong hands.

“That’s not just a regular inventory item like pencils or paper its something that has a liability for the city so we really need to some good track, good records of it,” Kavelman said.

APD admits there is room for improvement and Thompson says they’ve already taken steps to fix some things such as working to consolidate databases and no longer allowing reserve officers to keep their department issued guns.

Thompson said from now on reserve officers will have to use their own personal weapons which they’ve been certified on.

The department said despite the concerns raised in the audit no guns ever vanished.

“We know where all of those weapons were at all times, none of them disappeared,” Thompson said.

Another change is that from now on APD plans to start taking a full inventory of its firearms every year, the first one is scheduled to be completed in September.

The office of internal audit said it plans to follow up with APD in a year or two to see if the department has made all the changes they promised.