Last Sunday afternoon, Mary Jobe and her three children stood on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They held signs for hours. Her daughter wore a T-shirt that read: "APD Killed My Dad."

They stood about four miles south of where, two years ago, Albuquerque Police Department Officer Martin Smith fired two shots from his handgun. One at the rear tire of a Mitsubishi Montero. The other at the driver, Daniel Tillison, Jobe's husband and the father to her three children. The shot hit Daniel in the chest and ricocheted through his body. He died at the scene, unarmed. So now he's on the shirt, beneath those words.

Daniel was one victim out of 37 officer-involved shootings in the past four years in Albuquerque. Twenty-three of them have been fatal. That is a lot. Albuquerque is a desert city that grows out toward the Sandia Mountains and is home to about 500,000 people. New York City is the size of about 15 Albuquerques; it saw almost the exact same number of deadly officer-involved shootings, at 25.

Albuquerque's Police Oversight Committee has never punished an officer in a shooting.

New York City saw about the same number of deadly shootings (25) as Albuquerque in 2011 and 2012.

Which, along with last week's release of the shooting of a mentally ill homeless man named James Boyd, is why Mary Jobe and her children weren't alone. (In fact, five days before they stood on the corner, about 1,000 people peacefully marched to APD headquarters.) But on Sunday, she and about twenty other people stood on the road in front of Albuquerque police headquarters, reading the names of people who were killed by the APD. They were surrounded by SWAT officers, she says.

Fatal shootings since 2010

Aaron Renfro

Kenneth Ellis III

Mickey Owings

Chris Hinz

Julian Calbert

Len Fuentes

Enrique Carrasco

Daniel Gonzales

Alexei Sinkevitch

Jacob Mitschelen

Christopher Torres

Alan Gomez

Raymond Garcia

Michael Marquez

Mark Macoldowna

Daniel Tillison

Gary Atencio

Parrish Dennison

Kendall Carroll

Vincent Wood

Christopher Chase

Andy Snider

James Boyd

Alfred Redwine

By the time police threw tear-gas canisters after nearly ten hours of demonstration by hundreds, the protest made national news, which the larger protest hadn't. Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry called it "mayhem."

"The protest was peaceful until [the police] started interfering," Jobe says. "They threatened us. They were pulling on my kids' shirts."

Tuesday, just two days after the protest in memory of Boyd, another man was shot investigated 50 police departments, and has taken over 10 of them. If it were to happen in Albuquerque, Police Chief Eden would become second-in-command to a federal monitor.

But Berry had a different announcement: He'd sent a letter to the DOJ. He'd asked them to expedite their investigation of the APD that began back in November of 2013. "We do not want [officers] to see this as an indictment of them by the mayor's office," he said. The new plan would be to hire a fourth deputy chief to oversee DOJ findings and to help supervise internal affairs and training.

On Tuesday, Berry had rolled out a $500 million budget proposal for the coming fiscal year—$1 million of that will be spent on APD training reforms. They'll teach de-escalation techniques and strategies for dealing with people with mental illness. One-hundred percent of field services bureau officers will be required to receive crisis intervention training and certification. But a reform of this scale takes years. Based on previous DOJ settlements in states like Seattle and New Orleans in recent years, it's going to cost a lot more than the money allotted to make significant changes to Albuquerque's police force. The mayor's letter may be a million-dollar Band-Aid.

In the press conference Berry called the James Boyd's death a "game changer." Which raises the question: What about when Ken Ellis, a war veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder held a gun to his own head outside of a 7-Eleven in 2010? He was shot by a member of the APD. Was that not a game changer?

"It looked like they were about to go to war. This is a problem not only here in Albuquerque but throughout the country."

Now that the tear gas has settled along Central Ave., the University of New Mexico is back to normal. The slack lines are out; students eat lunch at the Frontier Restaurant, where kids with backpacks line the parking lot on skateboards. A lot of them have forgotten or moved past or never noticed what took place across the street from their Bookstore a few days before, when police vehicles from all over New Mexico paraded down the main street.

Brittany Arneson, a senior pre-law student at UNM, counted 51 police cars pass by Sunday. "We stood here and watched," she says. "There were tanks, horses, and tear gas. Traffic police were trying to move cars around with AK47s. When you have riot police on every corner, it's going to incite violence. It's going to incite anger and passion."

Arneson, an active member of UNM's Students Organizing Actions for Peace, showed up to the protest as soon as she heard things were getting heated. She and another student involved in the (un)Occupy Albuquerque movement, Danya Mustafa, were working on de-escalation tactics. They've worked with the families of police-involved shootings in the city.

"The militarization of our law enforcement is letting police have too much power that they are not being held accountable for," Mustafa says. "It looked like they were about to go to war. This is a problem not only here in Albuquerque but throughout the country."

Mustafa is from the West Bank. She says, sometimes Albuquerque feels like she's back in the Middle East.

"Just an hour ago, a man was shot in the head in the South Valley," she says.

At around 10 a.m. Tuesday, Gilbert Angelo Serrano, 33,—a fugitive who's been in and out of jail since 2001—was yanked out of his truck, bleeding after shots were fired by a U.S. deputy Marshal. At least one bullet hit Serrano in the head. He was unarmed.

A U.S. Marshals task force was attempting to arrest Serrano for violating parole and other crimes. Witnesses say the shooter did not identify himself as a law enforcement officer and that Serrano was cuffed before getting medical attention.

Sure, Serrano's gotten into some trouble with the law, but did he deserve to be shot? Would he have been shot had the police department in the same county not done the same thing 37 times in the last four years and gotten away with it? And does the DOJ have an obligation to come down hard in Albuquerque — where a shoot-first, ask-questions-later culture has gone unchecked — while they can still contain it?

For years, parents and relatives of people killed by APD, and their supporters, have attended Police Oversight Committee meetings, which Mayor Berry also suggested may need reform in his speech Wednesday.

The commission has never punished an officer in a shooting.

Each year, Mary Jobe and others hold a protest on October 22, Police Brutality Day. "All of the protests in the past, ten or fifteen people show up, if we're lucky. Everybody's afraid of the police," she says. "We've been fighting alone for a long time and the city of Albuquerque is finally opening their eyes to see that we do have a problem."

For years, parents and relatives of people killed by APD, and their supporters, have attended Police Oversight Committee meetings, which Mayor Berry also suggested may need reform in his speech Wednesday.

"It's supposed to be police oversight, not police cover up," Kenneth Ellis, whose 25-year-old veteran son was gunned down in front of the 7-Eleven told Alibi.com, talking about the oversight committee. "I thank God the DOJ is here, and I look forward to some indictments. I look forward to seeing this process cleaned up and fixed."

Although the city still awaits the final word about how the department will move forward, after more than a year of investigation, community leaders like Charlie Arasim — who have actively monitored the APD by filing lawsuits and posting videos of POC meetings since 2011—see a few good things happening at the DOJ meetings.

"The DOJ has been very receptive," Arasim says. "My take on the whole thing is that the DOJ has been starting with a blank sheet of paper darn near every morning as far as these reforms go. They haven't scratched the surface yet of what's going on here. It's gonna take some time to get answers."

But even if it takes another year, Albuquerque has a chance to find solutions to a problem that is much larger than the city itself: The militarization of at least one police force is real. The proof is in the video of James Boyd's dead body at the foot of a mountain, or the one bullet in the rear tire of a Mitsubishi that missed Daniel Tillison, or the one that didn't miss, or the 21 other dead New Mexicans that the Albuquerque Police Department shot in the last 48 months and will finally have to explain.

Non-fatal shootings since 2010

Wayne Cordova

Jose Castillo

Benjamin Marquez

Chandler Barr

Russell Tenorio

Orlando Paisano

Dennis Aragon

Santiago Chavez

Dominick Solis-Mora

Joaquin Ortega

Robert Garcia, Sr.

Shane Sherrill

Jeremy Robertson

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