Monday, August 9, 2010
Should Mexico do away with Municipal Police Agencies?
By Patrick Corcoran
Now that Mexico's annual July
electoral rush and subsequent political resettling are behind us, the nation is turning its focus back to the catalogue of
upcoming agenda items.
One of the proposals that will
surely be among the most closely watched is the creation of a unified state police department in each of Mexico's 31 states,
which would entail the disappearance of more than 2,000 municipal police bodies across the country.
The argument for this plan is
that the municipal police departments, which are lower paying and lower in prestige than their state and federal counterparts,
are riddled with incompetence and make juicy targets for the corrupting influence of organized crime. Evidence of municipal
police forces’ vulnerability is rampant: in the past two years, dozens of local officers have been arrested for protecting
gangs in separate incidents in Pachuca, in Veracruz, and in Torreón, among a myriad of other towns.
A state body, the theory goes,
would be far more effective than the scattered municipal departments in resisting the entreaties of organized crime. Because
of the increased centrality, the state police would have simpler and more manageable chains of accountability. Reducing the
number of police commands from more than 2,000 to less than three dozen will make it a lot easier to assign responsibility
for corrupt elements in a given city and coordinate a response with the federal government.
But while the proposed reform
may make the organizational structure simpler, that doesn't necessarily mean it will make the police more effective guardians
of public security. A recent paper from Mexico scholar Daniel Sabet helps illustrate why.
Sabet's piece, which appeared in the Mexican Law Review and cites research by John Bailey and Matthew Taylor, identifies
the broad slate of options that police officers and criminal groups have in dealing with one another. The cops, for instance,
can tolerate, collude, or confront organized crime, while the criminals can select between evading, corrupting, or confronting
the police.
The problem with regard to Mexico's
security is that for far too long many police officers and gangsters operated at a mutual equilibrium of corruption-collusion.
In recent years, there has been more confrontation from the police (especially among federal forces), which is arguably a
big reason for the spike in organized crime-related killings under President Felipe Calderón. But at the municipal level especially,
collusion remains far too common.
What Mexico needs is to engineer
an enduring recalibration of the equilibrium between the police and the gangsters, toward confrontation from the former and
evasion from the latter. This won’t eliminate organized crime, but it will turn criminal groups into more defensive
and less threatening actors, rather than the rivals of the Mexican state that they are today.
The above points may seem obvious
to the point of banality, but a thorough consideration of the driving factors of police corruption is absent from the most
recent effort to address it, as is often the case. There is no reason to assume that merely turning Torreón cops into
Coahuila cops patrolling Torreón will alter the calculus that today leads them to protect and serve criminal gangs.
Then there is the question of
who will staff the new police forces? If all the unified police reform amounts to is the wholesale transfer of municipal personnel
to state auspices, it’s doubly difficult to determine how this will make a major difference. Mexico has a long history
of mere changes of uniform being dressed up into “thorough” police reform, and they have almost always failed.
A police officer’s decision
of how to deal with criminals — that is, whether to collude, confront, or tolerate — can be influenced by a number
of factors: the likelihood of getting caught, the degree of professional commitment, and the ability to protect cops targeted
by criminal groups.
Therefore, the best way to increase
the effectiveness of police is to increase the likelihood that officers are punished for wrongdoing, with stronger internal
affairs bureaus, regular lie-detector tests, and stricter monitoring of assets; and to amplify the professionalization and
esprit de corps within the departments, through better training, higher-quality recruits, and larger salaries.
This won’t be an easy task.
Improving the police agencies, however they are organized, will require the different levels of Mexico’s government
to cooperate on a number of different goals simultaneously, and it will certainly require the steadfast attention of more
than a single presidential administration. In contrast, one gets the sense that the unified police was conceived of as a shortcut
through that unavoidable slog.
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Patrick Corcoran (corcoran25@hotmail.com) is a writer who resides in Torreón, Coahuila. He blogs at Gancho (http://www.ganchoblog.blogspot.com/).
