Debating the Municipal Police

This is a somewhat old column from Ernesto López Portillo, but I think it gets at something really important:

The commission [on police reform] that the president is proposing should build that route [to more honest, effective police] and foster an unprecedented diagnostic based, focusing not only on the symptoms, but also on their causes. For example, the poor police training and the low salaries are only symptoms, while the causes are in the institutional design that produces these conditions. The proposed commission should make an "institutional genetic map" that explains the relationship between the police officer and the institution upon which he depends. This is critical. The commission should patiently study the institutions, because each police only does or doesn't do what his institution promotes or permits.

The police have been trapped in a contingency problem, which is a chronic sickness that affects a good part of the authorities and many citizens, and which consists of improvising supposed immediate solutions, with the argument that "there is no time to lose".

This is a wrong that takes advantage of the desperation of the average citizen, who supports what look like overwhelming measures to resolve insecurity.

I couldn't agree more. The best example of this is last year's National Agreement for Security, Justice, and Legality, which was promoted very heavily by the Imagen/Excélsior media chain, with a healthy dose of the "there's no time to lose" rhetoric. But if you look at the specific points of the agreement, they were not the product of a careful study of the causes, and were vague to the point of incoherence. For instance, take point 15: Strengthen the customs administration. That could mean anything at all. Or number 39: Favor speed in judicial processes. Again, so unspecific as to be virtually impossible to measure, and therefore useless. Similarly imprecise objectives are littered throughout the document. As I pointed out at the time, the flaws of the agreement stemmed from the hurriedness and lack of attention, which is to say, they were built into it. It was a list of complaints turned into a media show, not an honest, long-term attempt to improve the performance of Mexico's security agencies. As long as Mexico's political and media elites treat the nation's biggest problems in such a way, they will be hard to resolve.