Mexican city aims to buck violence trend
MORELIA, Mexico — Marcela Muñoz, a police officer, approached a group of wary residents gathered on a sidewalk of a middle-class neighborhood here with an unusual mission: to listen.
“So, what’s going on?” Muñoz asked the two dozen or so people who had been invited to meet her. “What’s been happening lately?”
Over the next hour, as each stepped forward with concerns like drug peddling in the area, vandalizing and drinking on public property, she wrote down their grievances. By the time she left, with a promise to send more patrol cars to the area, she had earned a round of applause and an invitation to come back for tamales.
“We are here to help,” she said, urging the crowd to stay in touch via a WhatsApp group chat.
In Mexico, the police, often poorly paid and poorly trained, are frequently mistrusted or feared. The population sees them not only as incapable of tackling the country’s chronic violence, but also as often being its cause — at best, complicit in routine infractions like demanding bribes at traffic stops, and at worst, coopted by criminal gangs.
This is particularly evident in the state of Michoacán, ground zero for Mexico’s drug war. In this context, Muñoz’s friendly chat with local residents and hands-on approach were just short of extraordinary.
The community meeting is part of an effort by Bernardo León, a professor and writer turned police commander, to transform Morelia’s police officers into a qualified force that is welcomed by local residents. Three years into the effort, the program has shown results.
In 2017, the deadliest year in Mexico in decades, the number of deaths also went up in Michoacán. But in Morelia, the state’s capital, the number of homicide victims decreased 18 percent compared with the year before. In government surveys, the population also reported feeling much safer.
Despite an increase in deaths in the first six months of this year, experts argue that Morelia’s experiment with community policing should be part of a broader national security strategy.
The program has made the force more “solid and resilient,” said Rodrigo Canales, a professor at the Yale School of Management who is leading a study on police forces in Mexico along with the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness. “They are just ramping up, but they are definitely on the right track,” he added.
León, who worked as a security adviser for President Vicente Fox, said that the task of changing the police’s relationship to the population — and the public’s perception of the police — was often daunting.
Emblematic cases like the 2014 disappearance of 43 students who were attacked by police officers connected to a drug gang have traumatized Mexicans and scarred their image of law enforcement.
León found inspiration in community policing efforts in the United States as well as in the “broken windows” strategy championed by William J. Bratton, the New York police commissioner who cracked down on lower-level neighborhood crimes to improve quality of life.
A local police force like Morelia’s “can’t really solve the cartel situation,” said León, who was appointed to the position in 2015. “What we can do is deal with the issues that regular folks face every day.”
To do so, he recruited psychologists, lawyers and social workers and trained them to mediate neighborhood and domestic conflict. He also inaugurated victims’ centers that offer medical and psychological assistance, all under the guidance of Muñoz, who directs the centers, and her staff, nearly half of whom are women.
Having female officers to handle the frequent cases of domestic violence was crucial, as victims often feel more comfortable talking about the abuse with other women.