Albuquerque –
The Mayoral Election has strutted into a run-off election with incumbent Mayor Tim Keller and challenger former Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White. Claims from both sides are being made on TV and radio ads about grand numbers and scary records of public safety concerning the two candidates’ careers.
During a recent debate, homicide numbers came up and both candidates cited numbers. They both compiled death stats that went off of FBI reporting stats, and while that is a good resource its not completely accurate.
ABQ RAW has always gone off of the numbers provided by the Office of the Medical Investigator for homicide numbers. The OMI’s numbers are indisputable and as RAW as they can get. No deaths which occur within the city of ABQ or the entire state get past OMI. If someone is located dead no matter the circumstances(except hospice care) the OMI responds and has jurisdiction over it.
During the most recent debate White cited a total of 756 homicides during Keller’s two terms as Mayor of Albuquerque. His campaign said they used the FBI Uniformed Crime Reporting (UCR) data.
FBI Crime homicides by years that Keller has been in office vs OMI number:
2017: 70 FBI Reported number / 96 OMI number
2018: 69 FBI Reported number / 108 OMI number
2019: 94 FBI Reported Number / 119 OMI number
2020: 84 FBI Reported Number / 122 OMI number
2021: 126 FBI Reported Number / 163 OMI number
2022: Unclear / 174 OMI number
2023: Unclear / 153 OMI number
2024: Unclear / 150 OMI number
2025: Unavailable due to not reported / 108 as of 11/18/2025 OMI number
TOTALS: 443 FBI Numbers *(Note we were not able to accurately obtain years 2022-2024 / however 1,193 were listed as OMI numbers for 2017-2025
Mayor Keller went way back in time and claimed there were 1,000 homicides during White’s tenure as Public Safety Director under Governor Gary Johnson. It is important to note that the homicides reported by the OMI under Mayor Kellers reign are for Bernalillo County ONLY, whereas the claims made by Keller are the statewide numbers under Governor Johnson. This is not an apples to apples comparison and it is misleading. We found FBI data from UCR reports and were able to get the State of New Mexico Office of Medical Investigation numbers for those years:
1995: 148 FBI Reported Numbers / 180 OMI Numbers
1996: 197 FBI Reported Numbers / 185 OMI Numbers
1997: 134 FBI Reported Numbers / 169 OMI Numbers
1998: 190 FBI Reported Numbers / 180 OMI Numbers
1999: 170 FBI Reported Numbers / 187 OMI Numbers
TOTALS: 839 FBI Reported Numbers / 883 OMI Numbers
It is not clear why OMI and FBI numbers differed so much during the mid to late 90s. Information on OMI’s record keeping practices was not readily available.
In the years of 2022-2024, the FBI UCR changed to a new data format and made it difficult to find homicide reports from law enforcement agencies in Bernalillo County. We reached out to the FBI to see if they could get us the numbers. We will update you if we hear back from them on the 2022-2024 data set.
We are often asked why our numbers differ from what other media or police agencies report. The Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) does not have a separate category or classification for justifiable homicides in its definition of homicides. According to the OMI there is no such distinction between justified and non justified, the OMI categorizes all homicides as just homicides no matter if a court says they were justified. This is why ABQRAW counts all homicides in our total.
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