Mexico’s Police: Many Reforms, Little Progress
8 May 2014
The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) has released a new, comprehensive report, titled Mexico’s Police: Many Reforms, Little Progress, which provides an overview of Mexican police reform efforts over the past two decades. The report examines police corruption, human rights abuses and the flawed history of police reform. The importance of policing in light of Mexico's on-going security crisis is highlighted. An analysis of police abuses and human rights violations and US security assistance is provided.
Comments
Is the law enforcement issue in Mexico about Mexican police or US law?
Seems to me the US should own the part of the problem that belongs to us, and then focus our efforts on fixing that - rather than worrying about how the police forces of neighboring countries are being overwhelmed by the problems our domestic laws are creating for them.
This is not a call for mindless legalization, rather this is a call for ending the failed "war on drugs" and replacing a family of bad laws and policies with ones based on wide-eyed reality rather than blind moral fantasy.
The percentage of the American population who engage in problematic abuse of these types of drugs our laws attempt to control has stayed relatively stable regardless of the types of laws or degree of enforcement. We can take care of these people better, and in a manner that is not so incredibly abusive our own civil society and that of our neighbors by legalizing the market in a controlled manner. Reduce price, increase quality, raise tax revenues, disempower the vast illicit economy and the violent completion for control over the same, create self-funded testing and treatment capabilities, shut down dozens of newly unnecessary prisons, etc, etc.
Or we could go build partner capacity of the Mexican police...
It is time to get real about the world we live in, our place in that world, and how we best go about being the United States of America.