Merino on the Cities

Mauricio Merino's column this week was thoughtful meditation on the decline of Mexico's city governments. In the years since the PRI disappeared as the preeminent party, governing responsibility has decentralized and the city has taken on greater significance. One consequence of this has been the corruption of many city governments (especially their police departments) to drug gangs. The response to this has been an effort to centralize police operations in the federal government. Merino worries about the impact of all that: 

I don't doubt the urgency of attending to the security crisis that demands the (temporary) concentration of the police power of the state. But the municipalities are much more than poorly paid and corrupt police. They are a form of political and social organization that doesn't have a substitute, and that today is lost and defeated, to our misfortune, for bureaucratic reasons. Precisely now, when they are at their most indispensable to put back together our torn fabric. 

I'm not a believer in police centralization as panacea, and Merino's concerns are all the more reason to consider ways to build local police forces (and the city governments that run them) up from the bottom, rather than look to replace them.