Calderon proposes police overhaul

MEXICO CITY – Mexican President Felipe Calderon said Wednesday that he was sending Congress a plan to overhaul the country’s police system by doing away with local forces, long a weak link in law enforcement and the battle against drug cartels.

The proposal, which would require amending Mexico’s Constitution, would eliminate Mexico’s 2,000 municipal departments, where officers tend to be undertrained and poorly paid, and are seen as vulnerable to corruption by criminal groups. Patrol duties in towns and cities would be taken over by the 31 states.

The idea, called “unified command,” has been debated for months, as the death toll from the nearly 4-year-old drug war surpassed 28,000 and signs of police collusion with crime syndicates continued to pile up.

In August, six municipal officers in the northern state of Nuevo Leon were arrested in the assassination of Santiago Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos outside the industrial city of Monterrey. Local police are often swept up in arrests of drug henchmen.

Calderon already is behind a police overhaul at the federal level, where a hiring spree has boosted the number of federal officers to 33,000 and a modern academy draws trainers from the United States.

The federal cleanup has revealed problems. In August, officials announced that about 3,200 officers – nearly a tenth of the federal force – had been fired since January for failing drug screenings and other causes, such as absenteeism and substandard performance.

Despite that, Calderon and aides have argued that the weakness of Mexican law enforcement is at the local level, not the federal. Mexico’s 165,000 municipal officers make up more than a third of the country’s 427,000 police.

Shabbily trained and ill-equipped local police are no match for drug gangs and many officers’ frequent attempts to solicit bribes make them widely loathed by the residents they are meant to protect. In addition, more than 400 communities lack a police force.

The proposal to eliminate the local departments has the support of the nation’s governors and the main opposition party, making congressional passage likely. As a constitutional reform, the measure would also have to be approved by at least 17 of the 31 state legislatures.

Mexico’s mayors, who would lose control of local police and the budgets that support them, have come out against the plan, complaining they have been blamed unfairly for Mexico’s crime problems.