Policing the police in Mexico

The Mexican government announced another plan to curb rampant corruption within local police forces that makes them “a critical source of manpower for organized crime”. The main proposal is to unify the police command under governors’ authorities, thus to establish standards for recruiting, training, equipment and operations. Yet, the problem here is exactly the fact that state forces are also pervaded by corruption, so governors’ capacity to hold them accountable is already questionable.

This new plan seems to be actually a further development of previous attempts to tackle corruption within the criminal justice system. Back in 2000, the Mexican federal government created a comprehensive anti-corruption program aimed to prevent and combat corruption, and to foment transparency within the federal public administration. Two years ago it developed the Programa Nacional de Rendición de Cuentas, Transparencia y Combate a la Corrupción 2008-2012: a guidance to strengthen good practices and to improve a culture of legality, i.e., certain norms and principles for public services and for society’s interaction with public institutions. Though based on transversal policies linking different governmental institutions, it also focused on institutions responsible for public security. The program established five strategies to achieve this specific objective of curbing corruption within the criminal justice system:

1. To strengthen mechanisms to provide timely and effective response to public complaints against officials who engage in illegal/corrupt practices;
2. To develop a rigorous control of trust in the selection and evaluation of public servers;
3. To ensure scrutiny, monitoring and evaluation of the system, promoting society’s trust and confidence in it;
4. To foster a culture of denunciations, and to ensure complainants’ legal certainty and integrity;
5. To standardize criteria to prevent bias by the authorities in the implementation of norms.

On the program’s website there’s no achievements report whatsoever, which makes one little skeptical about government’s commitment with the cause, so to speak.