As Violence Soared in Mexico, This Town Bucked the 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, co-opted 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.

To tackle bureaucratic delays, he introduced new civil courts for misdemeanors. There, citizens charged with noncriminal offenses can pay fines and receive sentences that include performing community service or attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

But perhaps most significant, León offered citizens the possibility of filing their criminal complaints on the spot to the responding officer instead of having to go in person to the local prosecutor — a time-consuming requirement that deters many Mexicans from reporting crimes. According to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography, 92 percent of crimes go unreported in Mexico.

Under the new rules, the number of crimes reported to the police in Morelia soared to more than 5,000 in 2017, up from 435 in the previous year. Overhauling the police force was an important part of the equation — and that included improving the conditions under which they worked. León tapped a special federal fund to increase the size of the force to 614 officers, up from 120, and to offer them benefits like retirement funds, scholarships for children and food stamps.

He also spent $2 million on better-quality uniforms that increased officers’ pride in their appearance. Other actions, like buying patrol cars, were subsidized by federal funds set aside for tourist areas and high-crime cities.

León did not have the money to carry out all his intended changes, particularly a promise to significantly raise salaries, which start at $500 a month for new officers and are a source of complaint in the force.

Though experts recognize the model’s effects, some argue that part of Morelia’s recent success cannot be reproduced, as it is in part explained by the military’s role in shielding the city from powerful drug gangs, which have been mostly confined to rural areas. The army was first deployed in Michoacán a dozen years ago, and the operation was expanded the year before León was appointed.

The protection offered by the federal intervention allowed León to build up the police force according to his vision, said Eduardo Guerrero, a Mexico City security analyst who studies Michoacán.

“Most police chiefs inherit large forces riddled with significant problems, many of them already working for local drug gangs, " Guerrero said. “Morelia is not Mexico.”

León will step down this coming week when a new mayor takes office. It is unclear whether his program will be kept in place. This kind of turnover is common and remains one of Mexico’s biggest problems in establishing a consistent security policy.

“There are no shortcuts to transforming police corporations or dealing with crime,” said Canales, the management professor. “You have to give time for these efforts to mature and blossom.” But at least some of the changes that took hold over the past three years will remain.

On a recent morning, Officer Jessica Gutiérrez addressed a primary school classroom packed with children and their parents: “We are here to protect you and help you, not to hurt you,” she said.

A 26-year-old psychologist, she had dreamed of becoming “a real life super hero,” a police officer who would keep citizens out of harm’s way. But when she told her family she wanted to attend the police academy a year and a half ago, they rejected and ridiculed the idea, she said.

“Now they call me all the time to help them sort out all kinds of problems,” she said.

“I realized if I can change my own family’s perspective, I can change that of the rest of society.”