Police Reform in Mexico

Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change

Daniel Sabet

• Publisher: Stanford Politics and Policy
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804782067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Ordnung

The urgent need to professionalize Mexican police has been recognized since the early 1990s, but despite even the most well-intentioned promises from elected officials and police chiefs, few gains have been made in improving police integrity. Why have reform efforts in Mexico been largely unsuccessful? This book seeks to answer the question by focusing on Mexico's municipal police, which make up the largest percentage of the country's police forces. Indeed, organized crime presents a major obstacle to institutional change, with criminal groups killing hundreds of local police in recent years. Nonetheless, Daniel Sabet argues that the problems of Mexican policing are really problems of governance. He finds that reform has suffered from a number of policy design and implementation challenges. More importantly, the informal rules of Mexican politics have prevented the continuity of reform efforts across administrations, allowed patronage appointments to persist, and undermined anti-corruption efforts. Although many advances have been made in Mexican policing, weak horizontal and vertical accountability mechanisms have failed to create sufficient incentives for institutional change. Citizens may represent the best hope for counterbalancing the toxic effects of organized crime and poor governance, but the ambivalent relationship between citizens and their police must be overcome to break the vicious cycle of corruption and ineffectiveness.

1

Two Realities

José Luis Montoya

In 1995, the National Action Party candidate (PAN—Partido Acción Nacional) won the mayorship of Mexicali, Baja California. It was the first time since Baja California became a state in 1953 that Mexicali would be governed by a party other than the traditionally dominant Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI—Partido Revolucionario Institutional). The new mayor, Eugenio Elorduy Walther, promised to usher in a period of reform, and the local police force was a major focus for the new administration. José Luis Montoya remembers it as an exciting time. In 1996, he graduated from the newly created municipal police academy as part of the first generation of cadets to receive formal police training in Mexicali. He remembers that they felt special: like they were going to be different from the police who had come before them. As the police force purchased new equipment and police cars and invested in training and education, there was a sense that the Mexicali police were on a path toward modernization and professionalism.

After seven years of service, in 2003, José Luis Montoya was promoted to the position of supervisor, roughly the equivalent of a sergeant in many U.S. police forces, and given command over twenty men. He remembers his promotion fondly as his first opportunity to do policing the way that it was supposed to be done: working with citizens and doing honest police work. Recognizing that corruption was commonplace in the department, he told his men of his intentions and requested that anyone who was not in agreement ask to be removed from his command.

Montoya was assigned a dangerous low-income community with a history of drug dealing and consumption problems. Drug sales were technically federal crimes and not within his jurisdiction; however, the federal government did not have the capacity to enforce drug laws at the neighborhood level throughout the country. As a result, this major source of crime and violence went largely unaddressed. Moreover, it was common for municipal police to look the other way about drug dealing and accept a little money from dealers in exchange. Their technical lack of jurisdiction gave such deals political cover. In many respects, things had improved dramatically since Elorduy was elected mayor, but corruption was still a daily part of police work.

Montoya approached his supervisors and proposed attacking the drug dealing directly. He remembers arguing, “The federal and state police are not doing anything. You know that. At the end of the day, the community blames us for not fixing the problem. They don’t care who is technically responsible.” Today Montoya believes that his supervisors were complicit in the drug trade; at the time, however, they gave him the go-ahead. While wanting to go after local drug dealers seems like it should be part of the basic instincts of a police officer, Montoya’s actions were somewhat revolutionary. Attacking drug dealers meant threatening agreements that had been made between the police and criminals. Even those police who shared Montoya’s vision of an honest, professional police force were wary of the risks. His commanding officer warned him, “If the state police ever try to pull you over, don’t stop. They are complicit and will plant drugs on you.”

With at least tacit support, Montoya and his men began going after the several different drug-dealing groups in the community. One of the main gang leaders was a man by the name of Jazzan Manuel Torres García, known as “El Chango.” He had connections to powerful drug traffickers and surrounded himself with strongmen. One of El Chango’s muscle just happened to be a boyhood friend of Montoya’s, and Montoya persuaded him to serve as an informant—another revolutionary break from standard municipal police practice in Mexico.

Using his friend and other informants, Montoya and his men busted several drug-dealing establishments. When the dealers would try to move locations, Montoya and his team, acting on reliable intelligence, were always one step ahead. The work was not easy, however. He caught some of his men accepting bribes, and several attempts were made to threaten and/or bribe him into accepting the status quo. In his own personal account, Montoya recounts one dealer stating, “You don’t know for whom I work for. If you arrest me, they are going to kill you. You don’t know how many people are behind me; here we have always been ‘arreglados’ [colluding with the police] for years, and you are not going to come here and tell us what to do” (Montoya 2005). At one point a corrupt superior officer acting on behalf of the dealers ordered him to desist; however, according to Montoya, the officer was unwilling to put the order in writing, and Montoya persisted.

One day, El Chango came to Montoya’s house in search of a deal. Theoretically, El Chango should not have known where Montoya lived, but the dealer informed him that fellow police supervisors had given El Chango the young officer’s address. The dealer offered Montoya $2,000 a week, a surprising sum that was more than several months of his official police salary. The money was not just to look the other way. El Chango also promised to provide Montoya with intelligence so that he could arrest rival groups in the community. The deal would benefit everyone: El Chango would obtain a monopoly over selling in the community and Montoya would still get to make arrests. However, the young police supervisor rejected the deal, and two days later at 5 am his men arrested El Chango.

The persistent Montoya stayed with the suspect for all of the arrest process to make sure that El Chango did not threaten or bribe his way to freedom. Montoya returned to his house later that morning and lay down to sleep. Minutes later his sister rushed into the room in a panic: their house had been set on fire. The flames were extinguished, but this was not the end. At 1 am, a floral funeral arrangement arrived at his house with another threat. A short time later, his friend and informant was found dead.

Montoya went to the state police, who are responsible for the investigation of crimes, and told them everything he knew. Much to his satisfaction, El Chango was convicted. Had the story ended there, it might have been a success. However, El Chango, with the benefit of one of Mexicali’s best lawyers, won on appeal and went free. He returned to running drugs and bragged that he had beaten the system and Montoya, expressing his intention to have the young officer killed.

With a $10,000 to $25,000 price on Montoya’s head, the stress was at times too much. Fearing for his life and the lives of his wife and young son, he left the force. With few other options, he went public with his story so that, as he put it, “If tomorrow something happened to me, they [the authorities] couldn’t argue they didn’t know and with the hope that they would become interested and do something about it.” Montoya eventually returned to the force, but he was not a hero in his department. He was viewed as too uncompromising and as a threat. By 2010, he no longer held a leadership position, instead patrolling alongside young officers he once taught in the police academy. He continued to see endemic corruption, even among those former cadets who were his students in a class entitled “A Culture of Lawfulness.” Montoya acknowledges that the justice system failed him, but he remains as committed as ever. He stated in an interview:

If I backslide, then others will as well. I don’t feel like I have an alternative and just have to keep moving forward, adding my grain of sand and doing what I can. If I stop what I am doing, I can’t expect that others will keep going. My father has scolded me. He calls me stupid and says I should take the easy way out like everyone else. But I tell him that this isn’t what he taught me. He taught me to do the right thing and pardon me for believing in something and fighting for it . . . And you know what; my son is going to be worse than me.

This is a book about efforts to reform and professionalize Mexico’s municipal police departments. Through a qualitative and comparative case study of four municipal police agencies in Chihuahua City, Hermosillo, Mexicali, and Tijuana, set against a survey of additional departments and supplemented by public opinion and other data, this book explores the challenges confronting police reform in Mexico’s municipalities. I offer José Luis Montoya’s story as an introduction because it illustrates a couple of important points. Montoya entered the force at a time that appeared to be a watershed moment in policing in Mexicali. There is consensus in the Mexicali law enforcement community that the force began to professionalize in 1995 with the election of an opposition party to power. But this begs the question: why then was Montoya still confronted by such pervasive corruption and ineffectiveness despite years of reform efforts?

The need to professionalize Mexican law enforcement has been widely recognized since the mid-1990s, and numerous political and police leaders have come to office promising to do just that. A host of policies, purges, and programs have been implemented, and police and police leaders point to a number of advances in recent years, including improved training, higher selection standards, better operating procedures, and improvements in technology and equipment. To be sure, the Mexicali police force is in most ways far better off than it was in 1995. Nonetheless a casual review of newspaper reports and public opinion surveys suggests that police corruption and ineffectiveness are worsening rather than improving. It appears as though there are two realities to Mexican policing: one of reform and one of stasis. This book will explore these two realities as it seeks to answer why so many reform policies have failed to produce meaningful institutional change.

Montoya’s story is also a helpful introduction because it illustrates the many challenges confronted by those officers who want to change the way policing is done: corruption, jurisdictional conflicts, unsupportive leadership, criminals with the power to carry out reprisals, and a justice system that does not always deliver justice. While corruption is endemic in Mexican police forces, highly committed individuals risk their lives and some lose them for the security of their city and the integrity of their beliefs. Overgeneralizing about the police means ignoring the positive steps that have been taken and diminishing the contributions of those who deserve to be, although are usually not, treated like heroes. A central argument throughout this work is that reform requires incrementally building on the advances that have been made thus far. Police reform involves many challenges, but as this work will reveal, the erroneous perception that everything is wrong with Mexican policing ironically serves as an obstacle to meaningful change.

The Police and Reform in Historical and Comparative Perspective

Policing in Mexico got off to a bad start. Throughout Mexico’s early history during the 1800s, the central government had varying degrees of control over the large and diverse country. In the mid-1800s, then-president Benito Juárez founded a federal police force known as the “Rurales.” Attempting to govern amidst a civil war, the Juárez government was forced to embrace bandits to fill a portion of the ranks of the new police agency. Vanderwood (1992), in his history of Mexican policing, profiles commanding officers like León Ugalde, “an unmitigated and unmerciful bandit” who was bought off to fight the French and later given command of a rural police unit (58). The Rurales were founded to fight and dissuade crime, but they had a dual mission of repressing political opposition (López Portillo Vargas 2002). This dual mission would continue throughout much of Mexico’s history and as such, the police and their political leaders placed a higher price on loyalty to the government than to the law. Rather than to protect citizens, their job was to protect the state. Writing about the years under the rule of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, López Portillo Vargas notes, “The Mexican state made a deal—impunity and a certain degree of autonomy in exchange for political loyalty” (112), a deal that appeared to continue in the decades of one-party rule (Gómez-Cespedes 1999). For some, law enforcement’s historical antecedents appear to have foreshadowed today’s crisis.

Of course, a historical perspective on policing tends to reveal an unsavory past in most countries (Vanderwood 1992). Case studies of policing throughout Latin America frequently note that police forces emerged to protect the state and/or elites rather than the citizens (Eaton 2008; Birbeck and Gabaldón 2009). Many contemporary studies of police misconduct recognize the sad irony that those entrusted to enforce the law are the very ones who abuse and violate the law for personal gain. A historical-rational choice, or political-economic approach, flips this argument on its head, however. Mancur Olson (1993) goes so far as to argue in his theoretical piece on the origin of government that predecessors of modern governments were roving bandits who learned that if they settled down as “stationary bandits,” they could monopolize and rationalize theft in the form of taxes. In fact, scholars of police deviance note that absent accountability mechanisms, the discretion and secrecy under which police operate make misconduct probable—regardless of the ostensibly noble reason for having a police force (Sherman 1974; Kleinig 1996). From this perspective, police integrity rather than police misconduct is the historical anomaly.

A comparison with U.S. police history is illustrative of the extensive challenge to transitioning away from this norm of corrupt, politicized policing. While there are considerable differences in the two countries’ economic and political histories, the United States is one of the few countries in the hemisphere that shares Mexico’s highly decentralized police structure. Moreover, U.S. policing has slowly overcome many of the same challenges that Mexico’s police currently confront. In many ways, the United States offers a better historical comparison than many Latin American countries, where police reform has focused on overcoming the legacies of relatively recent military dictatorships.

The early days of policing in the United States (1840–1930) was branded the “political era” of policing (Kelling and Moore 1998), a term that could easily be applied to policing in Mexico today. During this time, the police were part of their cities’ political machines and took their command as much from political ward or district leaders as they did from their police chief (Fogelson 1977). The lack of organizational control over the police resulted in corruption, abuses of rights, ineffectiveness, and use of the police for political purposes. Warren Sloat (2002) uses court documents and commission reports to profile extensive corruption and abuse in the New York City police in the late 1800s. Although the police were overseen by a Police Board, the board was more of a tool to divide up patronage and ensure political allegiance. Commissioners representing Tammany Hall (the Democratic political machine) would appoint Democratic loyalists to the force and ensure their favored officers were promoted. Republican commissioners would do the same, and both sets of commissioners were able to get rich in the process through the sale of positions.

The extent of police abuses provoked the emergence of a progressive reform movement in many of the nations’ major cities, led by groups such as New York’s Society for the Prevention of Crime, the New York Chamber of Commerce, the Citizen’s Municipal Association of Philadelphia, the Baltimore Reform League, and the Los Angeles Committee of Safety (Fogelson 1977). While their successes were limited, they laid the groundwork for political reformers and police leaders of the early and mid-twentieth century such as August Vollmer, J. Edgar Hoover, and O.W. Wilson, who helped transition the police from corrupt political appendages to autonomous, professional law enforcement agencies. To remove political influence, civil service reforms were introduced, and efforts were made to insulate the police leadership from the political process (Kelling and Moore 1988). Throughout the following decades, reform chiefs throughout the country’s major departments introduced knowledge and psychological tests to police selection criteria, stressed officer education and training, expanded car patrols, improved and tracked uniform crime statistics, introduced accountability mechanisms, and began evaluating the police based on measurable indicators such as response times (Kelling and Moore; Grant and Terry 2005). The federal government also played a hand in promoting local reform. In 1964, the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) was created and funded to encourage policing-related training and education throughout the country’s academic institutions, and the National Institute of Justice was established in 1960 to promote research and advanced study of criminal justice and law enforcement issues.

While reformers made substantial advances, scandals of corruption and abuses of individual rights persisted. Following race riots in 1967, the 1968 Kerner Commission of the Lyndon Johnson administration (1963–69) found widespread racial injustices and insufficient internal review mechanisms to ensure police accountability. In New York City, the 1972 Knapp Commission, which grew out of the whistleblowing of policeman Frank Serpico, found systematic corruption throughout the department and an ineffective internal affairs unit. Contemporaneous and future commissions, such as the 1974 Pennsylvania Crime Commission, the 1991 Christopher Commission, and the 1994 Mullen Commission would continue to identify problems of police misconduct and insufficient accountability. These commissions gave rise to renewed efforts to improve selection criteria, create better procedures and systems for monitoring agents, raise police salaries, and strengthen internal affairs units, often with citizen oversight.

Police misconduct still occurs in the United States; however, it is no longer believed to be systematic, and professionalism is seen as the norm throughout U.S. departments. Reform was possible in U.S. municipalities; however, it was an extremely long-term process that required an active civil society, reformist police chiefs, separation between politics and public administration, public investigations into police corruption, federal involvement, and considerable economic resources. Reform might have occurred more rapidly in the hemisphere’s other success stories, Chile and Colombia; however, institutional change in these two cases involved many of the same elements. Of particular importance to both—with particular relevance for Mexico—was the separation between politics and policing (Dammert 2006; Llorente 2006).

Unfortunately, this complicated professionalization process is only just beginning in Mexico. Arguably a concerted effort to professionalize Mexican law enforcement did not begin until around the time that Eugenio Elorduy Walther took office in Mexicali, which was during the federal administration of Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León (1994–2000). Upon election in 1994, Zedillo’s administration conducted a diagnostic study of the state of the country’s police forces (Sandoval Ulloa 2000). The results were not encouraging. Investment in public security was minimal, estimat...