Creating Accountable Police in Mexico

Mexico can not afford for its police to be soft on crime and hard on civilians. 80% of Mexico City residents consider crime to be the greatest problem for the city’s 26 million people, and two thirds consider the police the most reviled of all public institutions. Studies show that Mexicans lack of faith in their police, rather than crime itself, is the biggest reason they feel unsafe. It is no surprise, then, that three quarters of Mexico City residents tell surveyors that they don’t even report crimes to the police.

“Police often pose a greater danger to the public than the criminals they are supposed to pursue” – former President Ernesto Zedillo, 1998

Mexican police forces often lack even the most basic systems of accountability. One Attorney General discovered when he took office in 1994 that it was even impossible to get a reliable count of the number of federal officers under his command. True internal affairs units are rare, and record keeping is so bad that even when officers are fired, the police department frequently cannot document the misconduct and are ordered by courts to reinstate the officer. (One estimate is that close to 800 federal officers have won their jobs back as a result of court orders.) Even those selected for special training – for instance through cooperative programs with the United States, are not tracked, making it nearly impossible to determine the impact of the training, let alone ensure that they can pass along these techniques to the rest of the institution. Some say the problem of accountability is even more fundamental., that the norms (and training) of police conduct are so inadequate that cops honestly don’t know what action or procedure to take to avoid problems.

How did the Sept. 11 attacks impact security in Mexico? Following the attacks of Sept. 11 in New York and Washington, the Mexican government moved to increase security in airports and seaports, as well as along the northern border with the U.S. It remains to be seen whether the heightened security needs in the wake of the attacks will be used to justify further inaction in moving toward civilian, accountable policing in Mexico. In the long term, border and port security in Mexico demands honest, well-run and accountable institutions that can be counted on to do their part.

Kidnapping, one of the Mexico’s most serious crime problems, demonstrates the close links between inadequate control of the police and the widespread sense of insecurity. Experts say Mexico is a haven for kidnappings because the victims tend to pay rather than call the authorities. It appears that they have good reason to do so: those who hire investigators have found the trail can lead to well connected police officials.

A significant move to incorporate several thousand soldiers into sensitive federal policing operations against narcotics and organized crime has also posed greater obstacles to a coherent system of accountability. Military personnel are subject only to the notoriously deficient system of military justice, creating a situation where personnel working side by side are governed by different rules and disciplinary systems — both of which are inadequate.

To win the public’s trust, police must become accountable to civil society and internally accountable to the chain of police command. Human Rights First believes that real progress toward rights-respecting, democratic policing will be achieved not by replacing corrupt police members with military personnel or by militarizing certain regions of the country, but rather by creating civilian policing bodies that are under the control of democratically elected authorities and responsive to the needs of civil society, and whose agents will be held responsible for rights abuses.

-"Delinquen más en el SSP," Reforma, 5 July 2001.
-"Aceptan Vicios en SSP," Reforma, 20 July 2001.
-Panel discussion on Public Security & U.S.-Mexico Relations with former Attorney General Antonio Lozano at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, March 19, 2001.
- Sigrid Arzt, "Scope and Limits of an Act of Good Faith: The PAN's Experience at the Head of the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic," in John Bailey and Roy Godson, eds., "Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.—Mexican Borderlands" (2000) University of Pittsburgh Press pp. 103-125.
- Human Rights First and PRODH, Legalized Injustice: Mexican Criminal Procedure and Human Rights, Human Rights First 2001.