ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – For the first time, we are hearing from Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen since the feds revealed BCSO was also involved in the DWI Deception scheme.

So far, just one deputy, Jeff Hammerel is on administrative leave.

There’s a lot the sheriff doesn’t know right now, but Allen was pretty frustrated by that Wednesday. He says he only found out about his deputy’s alleged involvement when Hammerel called him saying the FBI was at his door.

Without more communication, he says it’s nearly impossible for him to know where this starts and where it ends.

Hammerel has been a deputy with BCSO since 2010, and with the DWI unit for more than a decade.

Right now, the agency does not have a tracking system that allows the department to tally those missed court dates. So when the scheme was announced in 2024, Allen says he started looking back at cases and the connections to attorney Thomas Clear III.  But without more direction from the feds, he says case dismissals alone are not enough to start pulling deputies.

“What do I move forward with on assuming? That’s it. What do I move forward with, I don’t have any information. So I can sit here, and again, I can make you and everyone else feel good and say you know what, ‘I put ten deputies on leave because they had a high dismissal rate, and they’re involved.’ It would be a disservice also. I need to be responsible,” said Allen. 

Allen says he will do everything he can to ensure those who need to be held accountable will be held accountable. For him, that means letting the feds build these cases without intervention.

Unfortunately, that also means not knowing if or who else within the department is involved in this. 

“Do you think there are others?”

“I think another question would be do you trust there’s not others? I don’t trust anything, especially at this point. I would be naive to think there wouldn’t be others. Are they still here? Possibly. Is it someone who’s not here anymore, possibly. Everything is on the table at this point,” said Allen. 

Allen says the department is moving on a new office to bring accountability to BCSO. They are in the process of posting a position. In that position, a civilian would work closely with the command staff at the sheriff’s office and district attorney’s office.

The agency plans to develop a portal where they can monitor for pattens, not just DWI cases but all cases. They would monitor body cam footage, missed court dates, dismissals and identifying deputies, judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors so they can better understand what’s going on. 

Allen says there’s a lot at stake when a case gets dropped.

“That’s where the emotion plays, a lot of people forget about the victim and the cases they have and the closure they are not getting. This also empowers someone if they are deputy Hammerel’s queue of cases being dismissed they had one or two DWIs, now they’re at zero again. So, now they’re like ‘I got away with it again, I’m going to be able to do it again,’ that’s what angers me probably the most,” said Allen.