Saturday, November 28, 2009

Axing the Local PDs

Felipe Calderón voiced support for what is a popular idea on many opinion pages: getting rid of the local police departments, and replacing them with 32 statewide departments.

This proposal provokes great ambivalence at Gancho. On the one hand, local police departments are a veritable cesspool of corruption, and establishing new methods of accountability with new chains of command might bring about an improvement. At the same time, cosmetic changes of uniform have been largely unsuccessful in the past, because they don't necessarily strike at the heart of the problem: undertrained, underpaid, incompetent, and largely corrupt cops that are not adequately monitored by their political bosses. If the new regime that Calderón is proposing keeps better tabs on local cops and punishes wrongdoing more swiftly, that's great news, but there's no reason to assume that merely through centralizing local police departments, they will become more effective.

Furthermore, with apologies to Tip O'Neill, it's all police work that is local. All in all, it would be much better to keep the local police departments truly local, with the federal government focusing on improving the operation of the municipal governments that are in charge of them. Perhaps that's not a reasonable goal in the near term, but centralizing the police departments while doing nothing about local government corruption is an incomplete solution.

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