Bad Report Card

The Mexican state with highest level of violence for the past couple of years has been Chihuahua, as connoisseurs of Mexico news well know. Despite that, the state remains one of the nation's lowest spenders on public security. The state has received about 244 million pesos in federal grants for security expenditures, but according to the figures cited (which unfortunately run until only December 2007), Chihuahua had spent only 45 percent of that chunk. Additionally, Chihuahua's police are some of the worst trained. Other states with poorly trained cops include Durango, Sinaloa, and Tabasco, which would seem to support the perfectly logical premise that poor training leads to bad cops which leads to lots of violence.