UNIPOL and police “desertions”

Sorry about the dearth of reference links. I was half-responding to a post on another forum, and shoved together my original UNIPOL post with a response to a post on Juarez police desertions. I’ll add my references — and add categories — later this evening.

Engel Francisco Luna Vega, a would-be car thief, has the dubious distinction of being the first person arrested by UNIPOL — the latest innovation in a series of Mexico City police reforms. Until he was branded a “fiery leftist” by the U.S. press, AMLO generally got high marks from the U.S. press (when they noticed anything in Mexico beyond the narcotics suppliers) for innovative urban management. One of the real stars was then-police chief Marcelio Ebrard — who came from a background in public administration, and was not a policeman or military officer.

While Mexico City’s crime rate would have probably dropped anyway for simple demographic reasons (the Federal District population is slightly declining; more importantly , it is aging. Most criminals are men under 30), the police reforms were overlooked when the Fox Administration decided that AMLO was a threat, and launched a media campaign designed to discredit AMLO and all his works. There was a horrible price to pay when the Feds starved the District for funding, and there wasn’t enough money to keep police helicopters in the air. When Federal Policemen were targeted as potential child molesters and lynched in a remote and isolated indigenous community within the District, the local police simply had no way to respond. Televisa helicopters, which were able to reach the scene, filmed the lynching, which was used over and over again by the pro-Fox network to create an image of instability within the Federal District.

Rudolf Guiliani, brought in by then Police Chief Marcelio Ebrard and paid for by Carlos Slim and other businessmen, was largely seen as a buffoon by the Mexican press (touring Tepito in an armored car was not the way to burnish a “fearless crime fighter” image) though he tried to sell himself to the U.S. as the guy paid a million dollars to “clean up Mexico City’s police.” Nonsense. His company was paid a very high fee to make recommendations for police reforms. At the time, it seemed Guiliani had no basic understanding of the Mexican legal system… he seemed unable to grasp the fact that each Delegation has their own municipal police department, the District has their own investigative police and there are separate police departments for separate Federal, District and Delegation functions. And that the Judiciary and Executive Branches (at all levels) have different police functions and departments.

What Guiliana’s company was brought in to do — and did a relatively decent job of — was to make recommendations as disinterested outsiders that could be spun by the District’s administration as they went about making reforms. I don’t see that any of Guiliani’s recommendations were anything that wasn’t already in the works, or contemplated.

The District was already on the right track. Officers were being paid a living wage, and the departments were starting to get better educated, motivated and physically-fit officers. It’s only anecdotal, but one change I noticed was that you saw fewer fat, lazy cops hanging around taco stands, and more young, well-built cops flirting with girls. And more women officers too.

None of that, though, changed the organizational structure of the police departments. Ebrard made some progress there, though the number of different departments in the district was well over 40. He even introduced some new units, like the Embassy Police, the Lake Police and the Tourist Police. However the new units, with their distinctive roles and images, were designed to attract the best and brightest, and they’re generally well-regarded as far as Mexican cops go.

Which is part of the problem. Becoming a policeman in Mexico has always been a bottom-of-the-barrel job. The pay sucks, and there is no respect. I’ve mentioned before that I wonder if William S. Burroughs’ was really seducing cops with drugs and sex, as he claimed in Queer, or whether it was just that there were a lot of junkies — and gays (who had a very low status in the late 1940s) — who couldn’t get any other job working as policemen.

That is going to take years to change. If you notice, when there are serious civil disturbances in Mexico, local police are overwhelmed. They do not have the training or resources to handle problems, nor the discipline to deal with them. Naturally, the Army has to do that job. With the better federal units now recruited from the Army, there is some movement within Mexican police circles to recruit veterans, but this is new. Unlike the United States (where there is a huge veteran community, and — alas — too many combat veterans who have lost the early part of their career to military actions), police departments have a cohort of men and women who are used to uniformed, hierarchal public service employment.

With no real “veterans’ preference” program in the Mexican civil service, it appears the only ones to have taken advantage of combat veterans (a very small number of people in Mexico) are the gangsters. When I read that a high percentage of the enforcers in the criminal organizations are former soldiers, I say, “so what?” Who else is going to hire veterans based on their military experience? Then again, most soldiers in Mexico are draftees, from the lower classes. Most criminals are also lower class guys with some ambition. The fearsome “Zetas” — supposedly recruited from Mexican Special Forces — doesn’t have more than 200 members, mostly auxiliaries and supply people, not “soldiers.” Even crooks need cooks (and drivers and loaders and lookouts, too).

If the Zetas do include a high number of veterans, very few of them are “special forces” guys. The Mexican Special Forces units are very tiny fraction of the very small Mexican military forces overall (the exact number is a national security secret).

It appears security administrators are starting to notice the problem. Here in Sinaloa, the heads of the various state police agencies were all replaced last week with military officers, mostly from administrative backgrounds. Ebrard, during his tenure as DF police chief, also stressed better management, coming as he did from a background in public administration, not criminal justice.

What’s interesting — and potentially positive — about UNIPOL is that in addition to harnessing Military adminstrator’s experience, it is dealing with the downsides of fragmented police responsibilities. Judicial, investigative and prosecutorial police are all called to the event, and work as a team on any case. Bureaucratic chains of command are simplified, and the police commanders can focus on specific problem areas. Guiliani’s group had recommended focusing on minor crimes (as New York police did), but — understanding that reforming the police is as much a matter of building citizen acceptance of the cops as anything — is focusing on those types of activities that particularly annoy the citizens: auto theft, or retail narcotics sales, or whatever.

Unfortunately, the rest of the country still has to catch up. In some places, it seems that there are partial reforms (like using military adminstators here) or cosmetic ones — going after minor annoyances like cracking down on grafitti. And slowly, slowly, weeding out the “bad cops,” the incompetent, and those who just took a job, never expecting to face down armed criminals.

And — with no data from “normal” times — I don’t know that the “desertion” rate among policemen is any higher or lower than it has ever been.