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Jul 19, 2023

Film highlights Hobbs public defender's work on minor possession cases

Courts Reporter Ibukun Adepoju, a Lea County public defender in Hobbs, speaks in the Let’s Be Clear short film series. She is working to reduce the high number of drug possession cases in the oil

Courts Reporter

Ibukun Adepoju, a Lea County public defender in Hobbs, speaks in the Let’s Be Clear short film series. She is working to reduce the high number of drug possession cases in the oil field town of Hobbs near the Texas state line.

A New Mexico public defender’s use of data to reveal troubling trends about crime in and around Hobbs was highlighted in the series of short films Let’s Be Clear.

The series was produced by the nonprofit Measures for Justice and debuted at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Ala., earlier this month. In the roughly four-minute clip, district defender Ibukun Adepoju discusses how her research revealed the city of about 50,000 people had the highest number of drug possession cases per capita in the state in 2021, “100% higher than Albuquerque.”

Many of these cases — which make up about 30% of the office’s caseload — originated from minor traffic stops police conducted on people who were riding bicycles to and from work in the oil fields, where many have turned to drugs to help them “get through those long tedious hours of work,” according to the film.

“A lot of our clients don’t necessarily know every traffic law that goes with riding a bicycle,” Adepoju says in the clip, which features aerial shots of Hobbs and images of a man riding his bicycle through a working-class neighborhood in the small city.

“They’re not riding their bicycles intending to commit a crime; they are riding their bicycles because there is no other form of transportation to get to work,” Adepoju says.

“So what happens is you are riding your bike, no helmet, no headlight, boom — get stopped by the police,” she says. “They pat this person down and they find a small amount of methamphetamine. Now this person is a felon. They are in custody. That job they were trying to get to, they probably just lost it. So we find a lot of people who are addicts being prosecuted for nothing other than their addiction.”

“A lot of the clients we see with these kinds of charges come back over and over and over because we never actually address the problem,” Adepoju tells viewers.

The statewide Law Offices of the Public Defender used Adepoju’s data to start a conversation with local law enforcement and in 2021 helped launch a Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program in the Hobbs area to help direct people with drug problems to treatment so they don’t reoffend.

The measures have had some positive effect, Adepoju said Friday, but “a lot of things still need to change.”

“We’re still hoping possession of methamphetamine is at some point decriminalized or at least brought down from a felony to a misdemeanor,” she said. “We still need a lot of treatment facilities. We still need for prosecutors to figure out a different way to deal with possession.”

Much of what needs to shift, Adepoju said, is people’s way of thinking about drug addiction.

“I think we’ve seen some improvement, part of it being with the community coming together and becoming a part of the [diversion] program. That seems like a small thing to a lot of people, but it took a lot of work to get our community to buy into that, to get law enforcement to buy in. We’re still working on getting some parts of Lea County to join in the program. So the work is not done yet.”

Adepoju’s segment and other short films focused on using data to drive criminal justice reform can be viewed on the Measures for Justice website, measuresforjustice.org.

Courts Reporter

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