Daniel M. Sabet: Police Reform in Mexico: Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change.

Creechan, James H.

Daniel M. Sabet

Police Reform in Mexico: Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change

Stanford, CA: Stanford Politics and Policy, An Imprint of Stanford University Press, 2012, xvi + 278 pp.

Daniel Sabet's Police Reform in Mexico is the most comprehensive English-language book to examine the interaction between crime and politics in Mexico. Although the short title leads one to expect a criminological treatise focusing on police training and reform, Sabet's book represents a comprehensive examination of how government and institutions interact when faced with the challenge of security. In fact, the book's subtitle Informal Politics and the Challenge of Institutional Change, is a more accurate summary of the themes and content of this wonderful book.

For most of us, familiarity with the police in Mexico is summarized by a few simple banalities and tropes: police forces are inefficient and lack leadership, police are corrupt, the law doesn't apply to police, police are underpaid and resort to living off bribes, police are brutal and don't respect rights, and police do the bidding of drug-trafficking organizations following the law of plata o plomo ("silver or lead"). And while much of this is true, these simplistic descriptions overlook the complexity of Mexican policing--and worse, offer neither reasonable nor rational solutions for change and reform that has been demanded since the early 1990s.

Sabet's basic thesis is that police reform must be examined against a backdrop of two realities that alternately prescribe "reform" or "stasis" models for administering justice after every municipal, gubernatorial, or presidential election. Mexican constitutional law incorporates the constrictive principle of "no re-election" for every elected official, and municipal police departments routinely experience radical shifts every three years when municipal officials and administrators move to new jobs; departments must also adapt to another level of change every six years when State and Federal security policies are redefined by new governors and presidents. Daniel Sabet, demonstrating an impressive understanding of criminological literature on policing, astutely observes that these two alternating visions represent more than a formal policy direction; the two realities set the tone of informal rules and expectations within police personnel and are demonstrably and equally important determinants affecting the operational routines of policing and administration of justice in municipalities and states.

Sabet's generalizations and conclusions have a much wider reach than the effectiveness of police reform. Most of his observations are linked to an impressively broad range of interdisciplinary sources that include Mexican investigative journalism, history, political science, jurisprudence, constitutional law, criminology, sociology, and managerial and administrative practice.

At its core, Sabet's book is a case study of four different police departments in the northwest of Mexico located on the frontier and in the heart of a drug war zone. He provides a detailed description of how each department undertook a reformative process with varying degrees of success, and he devotes particular attention to their attempt to root out corruption. His analysis of these four departments began with Robert Klitgaard's (1988) observation that "monopoly plus discretion minus accountability equals corruption." His interpretation and operationalization of these factors within the four departments are described in full detail in Chapter 2. And even in the case where he saw positive outcomes, he concluded that they are also linked to the "institutionalization" of change and "will not bear fruit unless they are carried out by the following administration" (61).

This less than optimistic observation establishes the tone that dominates the remaining chapters of the book. Sabet explores the likelihood of successful reform in the face of ever-changing and problematic municipal governments in Chapter 3, analyzes the powerful presence of organized crime in Chapter 4, sorts through public opinion data and case studies to describe the role of citizens in reform in Chapter 5, reflects on the overall chances that reform will produce a civil society in Chapter 6, and turns to an examination of the role of federal politics and national initiatives in Chapter 7. In his concluding chapter he states that police reform in Mexico remains uncertain. The overall conclusion he makes is that his analysis of police reform in Mexico "has shown that the police are but one institutional actor in a complex policy arena, and that they are very much dependent on the current executive in office, highly susceptible to organized crime's threats and bribes, and generally distrusted and unsupported by its citizens" (230).

There is no other book, in English or Spanish, that incorporates such a comprehensive and complete overview of justice reform in Mexico. I highly recommend it to anyone looking at the interaction of law, government, and local institutions and to all those who hope to understand how local Mexican institutions are less than stable because of the vagaries of national politics.

This does not mean that Sabet's book should represent the final word on police reform. In 2006 there were 2,438 municipalities in Mexico (67), but Sabet's generalizations are drawn from a small sample of four mid-size departments that are located in a drug war zone experiencing only one version of the drug war. Sabet addresses policing in Mexico's larger cities only indirectly by reference to journalistic sources, victimization surveys, and opinion polls, but it would be incredibly worthwhile to apply his analytical framework to a broader cross-section of municipalities. Also, Sabet does not address the complicated question of immunity prescribed in Mexican organic law under the principle offuero, (1) but it is important to ask how the removal of this legislated immunity might change human rights and citizen participation levels. Sabet did explore different models in the management of police oversight, but said little about how Human Rights commissions, both state and federal, have often been the major counterbalance to police in the face of police and judicial injustice. And neither has Sabet discussed the asymmetrical influence of US policies on the structure of policing and justice in Mexico. For instance, I strongly suspect that police departments that defined reform as the updating of hardware and new technology were only able to do so because US funding supplied equipment under the auspices of Plan Merida.

Such issues can be addressed in future studies, but the job of exploring police reform in Mexico has become much easier and more focused because of the comprehensive analyses and interpretation found in this book.

Works Cited

Klitgaard, Robert. 1988. Controlling corruption. Berkeley: University of California Press.

James H. Creechan, University of Guelph

Note

(1) "Fuero" is a principle that exempts specific individuals or groups from sanctions attached to statutory codes. It is organically embedded in some "Civil Law Traditions" such as Mexico's, and grants a priori legal immunity to politicians and specific agents (e.g., military officers and personnel). Criminal law sanctions cannot be applied to them unless immunity is specifically removed (desafuero).