Police Bodies

Leo Zuckermann writes that there are nearly 2,500 police departments around Mexico, with some 427,000 carrying a badge and a gun. Only 4 percent of the total are federal officers. He thinks that's an absurd decentralization of the state's monopoly on power, but I'm not so sure. First, if you accept the idea that the security problems in many cities are not caused by inter-cartel battles but rather by local gangs fighting for turf, local police working among local populations are going to have to take the lead role. Second, according to the American Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are more than 18,000 police departments in the United States. The US is by no means free of extralegal violence, but nor is it struggling to assert the authority of the State.

The essential issue is control, not centralization; local police forces in Mexico too often answer to criminals, not the proper political bosses. It may seem easier to oversee one giant police agency from the federal government, but there's no reason that a governor or mayor or city council can't do it on a smaller scale. And there's also no reason to think of centralizing the police as some sort of corruption cure-all. After all, federal officers, though by and large more reliable than locals, are involved in plenty of illegal shenanigans, too.