| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Mexican president wants to scrap city-level police units |
| 2010-01-27 |
| President Felipe Calderón's administration wants to dissolve Mexico's 2,022 city police forces, saying many of them are so badly educated and vulnerable to corruption that they are undermining the country's crackdown on drug cartels. The proposal was announced by Public Safety Secretary Genaro GarcÃa Luna as he released gloomy new statistics on Mexico's battle against crime. The country's murder rate rose from 9.69 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007 to 14.72 in 2009, nearly triple the U.S. rate of 5.6. Cocaine use in Mexico has quadrupled since 2006, and methamphetamine use has quintupled, GarcÃa Luna said, despite a massive, U.S.-backed buildup in federal police. The government wants to replace Mexico's 160,967 municipal police officers with bigger state police forces and is lobbying governors for their support, GarcÃa Luna told lawmakers during a congressional hearing late last week. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose |
| #1 Gee, that doesn't sound like a good preliminary move to a centralized dictatorship does it? I understand his rationale, but, this seems like a potentially nasty move to dictatorship. How about you keep them in place, work to train them better and leave them to rolling drunks and directing traffic till they sharpen up? |
| Posted by: AlanC 2010-01-27 11:17 |