Politics: Mexico’s police forces are ill-equipped to deal with heightened public insecurity
Public insecurity is on the rise in Mexico. The latest national victimization survey indicates a 17% increase in crimes in 2023. The three most frequent crimes are fraud, robbery and assaults on public transportation or on the street, and extortion. The vast majority of these crimes, about 90%, go unreported, mainly because victims do not expect justice from the police or prosecutors’ offices.
Police capacities nationwide are clearly insufficient on both a quantitative and qualitative level. Furthermore, the number of police officers and the budgets allocated on both the state and municipal level have not grown much in the past 10 years, including during President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s administration. The number of state police officers per 1,000 inhabitants is a paltry 0.9.
Police departments are plagued by other deficiencies, including low salaries and the reduced number and low quality of employment benefits, such as scholarships, housing loans, vacations, and pensions. Rank-and-file police officers are dissatisfied and respond with work stoppages and demonstrations. This dismal picture of public security, coupled with the increase in crime rates and the absence of any sign of qualitative or quantitative improvement in the police forces, have fed the growth of private security corporations, whose number has doubled from 2010 to 2023.
The outlook is not promising. A previous attempt at a national agreement 15 years ago to address the problem of public insecurity via legal reforms to codify a model and a national police system was shelved by the PRI, in power at the time. But such a necessary agreement to strengthen the police budget and personnel, as well as overhaul the organizational and technical capacities of the country’s police forces on a national, state and municipal level, is clearly not on President Claudia Sheinbaum’s agenda.
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