Marcelo Ebrard, the minister for public security in Mexico City, said that the Giuliani Partners Group (GPG) had come up with 146 proposals for improving law and order in Mexico City. He said that the proposals were the product of 20 working groups set up by GPG to look at policing and the judicial system. The most important proposal, Ebrard said, was that the two main police services should be combined. The Policía Preventiva (PP) are currently little more than beat bobbies, while the much smaller Policía Judicial (PJ) handle investigations. Giuliani Partners has also recommended expanding the PJ and increasing the scope of Mexico City's public security agency, to which both police forces are answerable. Another controversial idea floated by GPG is that state judges should take a greater role in deciding which crimes should be prosecuted.
Equally controversially, GPG has also suggested that the City's legal code should be changed to give individuals the right to start criminal prosecutions. The firm has also proposed that the city council should set up a fast track judicial procedure to deal with open and shut cases, and it had recommended the idea that the city council should set up a special unit to pursue organised crime and the assets criminal gangs control. Giuliani Partners claims that if all its recommendations are adopted, the crime rate in Mexico City will fall by 10% a year.
Practicalities
The main practical suggestion from GPG is that the Policía Preventiva should introduce the Compstat system to match police resources to problem areas. The system will allow managers to assess outcomes right across the organisation. Ebrard said that almost half of the Giuliani team's suggestions had already been implemented. The main example of this is the setting up of an internal affairs unit in the public security department to deal with complaints, especially about corruption. He welcomed the idea of, in effect, giving the PP the powers currently wielded by the PJ so that they could investigate crimes such as robbery.
The GPG has also suggested that the city council should put up closed circuit TV cameras in the metro; establish a proper record of bus drivers; put panic buttons on buses, and take steps to eliminate unregistered cabs. More controversially, the GPG suggested that the PP should set up anti-graffiti units and draw a up registry of car breakers, car part retailers and even the people who wash car windows at traffic lights.
Legislation
Ebrard said that he would start work on drafting legislation to give form to the changes suggested by GPG. He said that he would also ask the city council to increase the budget for law and order by at least 10% next year.
The main opposition party in Mexico City, the Partido Acción Nacional, is unimpressed with what GPG has produced. José Luis Luege, the PAN president in Mexico City, said that there was nothing new in the proposals and that they were all ones which anyone interested in reducing crime would advocate. Nevertheless, Luege said that the PAN would support the government in its effort to reduce crime. He added that the government should admit that combating crime should be the city administration's number one priority.
Payment
The US$4.3m bill for the GPG's 146 recommendations is being met by a group of private sector businessmen, led by Latin America's richest man, Carlos Slim Helú. The group of businessmen is known as the Ciudadanos Alíados por la Seguridad Pública en La Ciudad de México. The group has handed over US$3m to the GPG already. The balance is due by 3 October.
Reactions
Groups representing the homeless and others working with street children in Mexico City are appalled by the GPG's suggestions. The city ombudsman, Emilio Alvarez Icaza, speaking on behalf of the NGOs that work with street children, said that there should be no trade-off between human rights and law and order. He argued that the government should be careful not to criminalise the unfortunate. He said that beggars, street hawkers, car-window washers and even prostitutes were economic victims and should not be dealt with by the police.
César Báez, the coordinator of the Programa SOS en las calles, said that the GPG had not consulted the people who live on the streets as to what should be done. He argued that, at the very least, the GPG should have talked to the NGOs that deal with these groups. What the city government wants to do with street children is get them housed in hostels.
The Polanco pilot
Ebrard said that the city government had been implementing some of the GPG's suggestions in Polanco, an upmarket but central part of Mexico City, for the past five months. He said that the results had been encouraging: reported crime figures had dropped since the pilot was started in March. Polanco is considered a high crime area because it is close to places that are traditionally seen as nests of crime, such as Pensil, Anahuac and 5 de Mayo.
The authorities say that the number of muggings in Polanco has dropped from around eight a day in March to around two now (early August). The number of car thefts has also gone down from around 10 a week to just two.
The most interesting result was that PP officers, either in plain clothes or in uniform, had started to take on some of the tasks reserved for the PJ. The pilot project was managed by the attorney-general's office for the borough of Miguel Hidalgo. Ebrard claimed that the PP's involvement had led to the arrest of several criminal gangs operating in Polanco. The main success was against gangs which specialised in stealing Cartier and Rolex watches and luxury cars. At least 10 people involved in this branch of crime were arrested. Another 104 hoodlums were also arrested and 20 guns confiscated.
He claimed that the pilot, known as Operation Polanco, had delivered results because it had put more plain-clothes policemen on the street. Hermenegildo Lugo Lara, who oversaw the pilot, claimed that it was not enough just to flood prime areas with plain-clothes policemen: the policemen also had to be retrained. Lugo Lara stressed that the success of the pilot was not due just to deploying more policemen: he said that another innovation had been setting up information rooms in which locals could identify criminals or make allegations against people who were known to the police.
End of preview - This article contains approximately 1170 words.
Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article
Not a Subscriber?
Choose from one of the following options
