Alberto Mena (Police professionalization in Mexico still pending) notes the uncoordinated and politicized attempts here in Mexico to overcome deficiencies in our law enforcement system, and he is right about the challenges. These challenges are not unique to Mexico.
Former U.S. police officer, Nanelle, on her “What’s Up in El Salvador?” blog, writes what is commonly said about the difference between the police departments she worked with, and police not just in El Salvador, but from anywhere from the Rio Bravo to the Straits of Darien:
Beyond lack of resources, there are differences in philosophy and cultural expectations. There is news about lack of resources, and news complaining about lack of convictions. From what I read you would think the PNC was falling apart, due to a mix of incompetence, lack of training, lack of resources, lack of motivation and corruption.
Nanelle sympathetically notes that the police in this part of the world are caught between a rock and a hard place. Underpaid, under-equipped and under-appreciated, they are expected to be the well-educated, efficient and honest coppers of the American police dramas broadcast on Latin American television.
Any bureaucracy receiving funds are going to spend the funds. That much of the funds for police reforms comes from the United States government’s “Plan Mérida”, which — despite its ostensive purpose of assisting Central American police — has to be spent in the United States. This means the money is going to go more towards hardware and other visible symbols of police activity — guns and helicopters and surveillance cameras — that make a political statement. Provincial media regularly shows off new police trucks and guns and uniforms while highlighting the local politician who arranged for the “gift”. Maintaining the guns and helicopters and cameras, and training officers to use them is often a lower priority. And, less “sexy” types of resources are likely to be overlooked.
Police in the United States and other wealthy countries sometimes complain about the “C.S.I. effect” — the expectation that every crime will receive a thorough investigation. Refrigerators aren’t sexy, and you almost never see them on television, but where would “C.S.I” be without a well preserved corpse? One reason so many murders go unresolved in Central America is simply that small communities have no facilities to preserve evidence (let alone victim’s bodies). In a tropical climate, sometimes a photograph and a quick burial is about the best that a small municipality can handle. While the full story of the 120 murder victims found in a grave in San Fernando in Tamaulipas State (Mexico) will probably never be known, international attention on the crimes (many of the victims being Central Americans trying to reach the United States), led to an unusually thorough attempt to — if nothing else — identify the victims. But, whether mass murder or something less heinous, there may be a willingness to investigate, but neither the equipment nor the budget to do so.
In theory, addressing resource and training issues would resolve many of the complaints about a lack of convictions. I don’t see though, that a low criminal conviction rate is a particularly burning issue in Mexico. If anything, the polemic has revolved around the problems of a an ossified court system in which persons jailed for “probable cause” can languish for years before their cases are resolved. Court reforms — notably a change in procedure and judicial processes, designed to lessen the likelihood of innocent people being wrongly convicted (or are needlessly jailed) — would supposedly create confidence in the legal system, but such reforms are only slowly being implemented: perhaps because funding for justice and law enforcement is being channeled overwhelmingly to the police.
Overcoming the lack of motivation and corruption may not be anything money can fix. Trust in the police — even if there is the political will and the financial resources to make reforms —depends on public perception of the officers. There are two problems here. First, nowhere in the world are police — although generally recruited from the poorer and less educated classes — are the police themselves seen by the poor as protectors of privilege.
And, the police, being used to protect the status quo, are often seen as agents of the existing power structure, not of society as a whole. Mena wrote: “… our same legislators and politicians who sought (and continue to seek) to increase their income, or perhaps to maintain power at all cost… did not wish to lose the personal power that police bodies provided them, and even less so were they interested in the issue of security.”
The police can’t change the political status quo, but perhaps they can be made the respectable and respected types that populate foreign television shows. That takes a change in imagination, and alas, the predictable response was … a television show. But, “El Equipo”, a police telenovela, with Mexico police heroes, (and heavy financial assistance from the Secretariat of Public Safety) was, by all accounts, a flop. The characters and the drama might have been interesting, but no one believes that Mexican police are like the television heroes of CSI or Law and Order: middle-class “solid citizens”. More believable — and maybe better propaganda for the police — was the small “cinema verite” “Ladies de Polanco,” a widely distributed (via youtube and shown repeatedly on national television) of two obviously wealthy and very drunk women berating a Mexico City police officer. That the officer remained calm and professional despite the ill-treatment by his social betters (or people who thought of themselves as his betters) won the police a certain amount of sympathy by the poor and working class, who feel themselves as abused by the rich as the police officer was.
But working class solidarity, a sympathetic police officer or two on television or paying officers a middle-class salary aren’t, by themselves enough to convince the people to support the police, nor the police to support the people. For that, you perhaps need to turn to programs like Mexico City’s Letras en guardia — an outgrowth of an unusual experiment that brought together the creators of fictional crime fighters, and the real thing.
By the generally low standards of Mexican municipal police departments, Nezahuacoatl (one of Mexico City’s largest, and poorest, suburbs) stood out for sheer incompetence, low morale and low standards. Native son Juan Hernández Luna — a poet turned police reporter turned crime fiction author — recognized that citizen perceptions of police are largely shaped through perception. While Neza’s police department might not have the tools and equipment of the Law and Order team, there was no particular reason Neza police couldn’t perceive themselves as an integral part of the community and be seen by the public as reasonable intelligent human beings. Programa Literatura Siempre Alerta introduced the Nezahuacoatl municipal police department to their fictional brethren.
It was never intended to turn municipal coppers into Sherlock Holmes, or even the crew on Law and Order. No, the idea — and this is what I found so brilliant about it — was not only to improve the reading skills of the generally undereducated local police officer — but to find a way to allow police officers to discuss their own lives and their interaction with the public… and, perhaps more importantly, to introduce them to the police officer as a person of respect within society.
It worked. Expanded to include not just classic Spanish language literature like Don Quixote and 100 Years of Solitude, but everything from art appreciation to dance classes, police morale increased. More importantly, as police officers began to see themselves as persons of respect, and — as seeing themselves as respectable citizens, show respect to their fellow citizens. Polling showed increased trust in the Neza police and crime rates dropped. Hernandez program received recognition not only from Mexican academic institutions, but from the inventors of the respectable policeman… Scotland Yard.
The Nezahuacoatl program was canceled in 2009, when a PRI administration took over the municipal government (and the officers went on strike demanding an end to bribery!). However, the Federal District adopted a similar program, Letras en Guarda, in 2007. That the Federal District continued it is not surprising — the Jefe de Goberierno, Marcelo Ebrard — with a background in social services administration — had been the unusual choice for chief of police under the Lopez Obrador administration, and improving the quality of the Federal District police has been a priority for years.
Police reform is not something that comes overnight. It is not a matter of hiring more officers, or changing the organizational chart. Nor is it a matter of focusing on the priorities of the United States, nor of public relations. What Hernández Luna recognized, and what he should be remembered for — is understanding that fiction is, as Andre Gide once said in his own crime novel, “a mirror held up to reality”. The reality of crime and punishment in Mexico (and everywhere else, both in fiction and reality) depend on how we reflect our cops and robbers… until we see our cops as men and women of respect, and they see the citizens as equals deserving respect, throwing money and manpower and new and more lethal weapons (paid for by the United States or not) is likely to be wasted.