For years and years, Mexicans citizens have distrusted their police forces.
Countless cases of corruption, brutality, lack of preparation and inefficiency have affected the police’s image for decades. It would be a waste of time to recall the scandalous cases in which police officers have been involved in kidnappings, extortions, drug trafficking and many other crimes.
Efforts to cleanup Mexican police forces can be traced back as far as 1991, when the Mexican government, still under control of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), announced a complete reorganization of the Federal Judicial Police, which included the creation of a special anticorruption force and some internal affairs units.
The reform in 1991 and the subsequent attempts to fight corruption within police forces have failed for several reasons, but most importantly because corruption is so deeply rooted in corporations that eradicating it would mean the destruction of the entire organization and the creation of a new one.
In that sense, the saying “one bad apple destroys the bunch” is more appropriate today than ever. Any and all genuine efforts to cleanup the police forces have been unsuccessful because those bad apples have been stronger and resistant to any kind of pesticides.
President Felipe Calderón has consistently talked about the need to reform the police forces. Yesterday, during the celebration of the Federal Police Day, he called on young people to join the police corporations as a public service to their country. He even said that the police profession should be seen as a “civic priesthood”.
What Calderón was emphasizing was the need of making the job of police an honorable profession, a public service that can be recognized and trusted by the majority of the citizens as it is in other countries of the world.
It would be absolutely naïve to think that that transformation could happen in a couple of years, or even in a decade. To achieve a change of this magnitude would require an entire generation and a government’s iron will to stay on the top of the issue and keep it as a national priority.
Some efforts have been made and some others are on their way. Just recently, the International Police Academy was inaugurated in the state of Puebla, with funds from the Merida Initiative. In theory, the students there should be better prepared to deal with issues such as intelligence, criminal investigations, ethics and others.
As I mentioned above, it could take generations to change the structure of the Mexican police forces. Maybe we won’t see that, but hopefully the children of our children will. But it is absolutely necessary to start right now, because as one political analyst from the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City has said “you cannot fight a war like this without a very clean and professional police structure”.
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