Mexico Mulls Dissolving City Police Forces

(Aug. 25) -- Few mayors are keen to see their own municipal police forces abolished. But few have faced the violence and corruption Jose Reyes Ferriz has seen as mayor of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.

"City police have names, they have faces," Reyes Ferriz said in an interview with AOL News. "They are very vulnerable to organized crime."

That's why Reyes Ferriz, whose border city has the highest murder rate in Mexico, is part of a group of local and state leaders that this week endorsed a fundamental reorganization of Mexico's police forces. The vote of the Special Commission of the National Public Security Council isn't binding, but supporters hope it will jump-start a more formal legislative process to refocus Mexico's failing war on the drug cartels.

The leaders are meeting today with Mexican President Felipe Calderon to push for streamlining the country's 2,400-plus municipal police forces into 32 state police departments, each under the control of one of Mexico's state governors, Reyes Ferriz said.

He said larger forces would be better suited for battle against well-armed drug cartels, which have become a size or two too big for city police departments. "The state and federal police departments weren't big enough so they delegated that job to city police departments," the mayor said. "That's a mistake, and it didn't work."

The new plan came just days after the latest in a series of brutal attacks on office-holders thought to have been perpetrated by cops working for, rather than against, the drug cartels.

Edelmiro Cavazos, the mayor of Santiago, a picturesque city outside the Mexican business capital of Monterrey, was kidnapped early last week. His gagged and blindfolded body was found Aug. 18, and two days later, seven Santiago police officers, including Cavazos' bodyguard, were charged in connection with the murder. The city's police force has only 10 officers altogether.

Calderon convened a series of high-level security meetings this week amid growing frustration that his administration's dispatch of federal forces to help take on drug cartels has not succeeded. The deaths of some 28,000 people have been attributed to the drug wars since Calderon took office in December 2006.

Mexican municipal police are on the front line in the confrontation with drug cartels, which are often out to kill them, compromise them or both.

The government said last week that 2,076 police have been killed since December 2006. Cartels are paying an estimated $100 million a month in bribes to corrupt municipal police officers, Mexican Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna said early this month.

That sum, he said at a conference on drug-trafficking, "is the portion the government doesn't pay police officers so they can live with dignity." With 33,000 officers in the federal police force and another 430,000 serving on disparate state or municipal forces, that estimate would mean the cartels pay out an average of more than $200 per officer each month.

When he assumed the mayor's office in July 2007, Reyes Ferriz forced all Juarez cops to take "confidence" exams. He then fired about three-quarters of the force, lured new hires with increased salaries and required that rookie cops go through police school.

Some fear such a move will deprive cities of police functions like regulating traffic and responding to domestic disputes. During a security forum in Puerto Vallarta earlier this month, the president of the Mexican Municipalities Association, Azucena Olivares Villagomez , said that 90 percent of the association's members opposed the idea of a national unified force.

"We want to express our gratitude for this proposal to combat organized crime, but ... we want to reaffirm that the municipal police are not responsible for the rise in delinquency, but that this is a problem with multiple causes," she said.

Reyes Ferriz said that Congress could vote on a resolution when it reconvenes Sept. 1. But it is still unclear whether a broad enough consensus can be reached, particularly since a shift of police power from the municipalities to a state or federal level could require an amendment to the Mexican constitution.