In October 2001, just a month after the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, when questions of security were on the minds of public officials everywhere, the leftist mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, surprised everyone by ceremoniously inviting the controversial soon-to-be ex-mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, to advise the authorities of the Mexican megalopolis on the implementation of the no-less-controversial plan called “zero tolerance,” the idea that no crime is too small to be prosecuted.
For the modest sum of $4.3 million, Mayor Giuliani and his team of consultants would commit themselves to developing a plan to implement zero tolerance in Mexico City, taking into account the peculiarities and the magnitude of the city and its security problems. The city’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, led by the billionaire Carlos Slim, agreed to pay the entire bill; supervision of the project would fall to the chief of the city’s Public Safety Police (SSP), Marcelo Ebrard.
The objective was clear: to emulate the spectacular reduction of crime and insecurity obtained in New York under the stewardship of “America’s Mayor.” In 1994, the year Giuliani took office, New York City registered 1,927 murders and 430,460 serious crimes. Six years later, midway through his second term, the figures had fallen to 671 murders and 184,111 serious crimes. According to the official version, all this was due to the zero tolerance program put in place by the mayor.
These statistics, the urgency of the city’s insecurity problem and, possibly, López Obrador’s presidential ambitions, convinced the leadership of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) that their best response to Mexico City’s crime problem was the importation of Giuliani’s crime-fighting model to the city. A few days after the announcement that New York’s super-mayor had been hired, Victor Hugo Círigo, head of the PRD in Mexico City commented that “if Robocop existed, we would agree to bring him to Mexico.”
But the media gave voice to some doubts. Several Mexican and U.S. criminologists, sociologists and human rights experts began to remember the dark side of the New York experience. The question of police brutality was raised, and the experience of Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who after a dispute with a nightclub doorman, was beaten and sodomized in a New York City precinct house, became common knowledge to the readers of the capital’s newspapers.
Various studies began to appear on the nation’s front pages, making evident what was already suspected—that the police force of Mexico City was one of the most feared on the continent, not for its crime fighting prowess but for its high levels of corruption. Doubts were raised about the wisdom of putting greater punitive resources in the hands of a badly paid, corrupt police force that had neither the capabilities of investigation nor the support of a slow and bureaucratic judicial system. The press also began running stories about “racial profiling” and raised fears that zero tolerance, applied in Mexico City, would degenerate into the indiscriminate imprisonment of the poorest citizens of the city.
It was also pointed out that U.S. cities with a “community policing” model, like San Diego, obtained the same decrease in crime as New York over the same period. All these contrary opinions forced the Mexico City government to organize a number of public meetings designed to bring the critics and the supporters of zero tolerance closer together and to calm the fears of a confused public.
Despite the criticism, the work of Giuliani Partners continues. Maureen Casey, a vice president of Giuliani Partners and the former Deputy Commissioner of Policy and Planning at the New York Police Department, has visited the city many times and is preparing a first report of recommendations, to be presented later in the year by Giuliani himself. In March of this year, the government of López Obrador presented two major initiatives to the city legislature, one to streamline the SSP and the other to create the Community Police, designed to promote citizen participation in public safety.
The creation of the Community Police is more significant than it appears at first glance. After the strong negative reaction among the city’s progressive circles to the hiring of Giuliani, the leftist Mexico City government has been anxious to show that its interpretation of Giuliani’s recommendations will contain proposals that are less reactionary than those implemented in New York. López Obrador’s government has opted to apply zero tolerance, but in a nuanced manner, implementing at the same time the “San Diego model” of community policing.
We will have to wait to see whether the PRD leaders manage to emerge from the political difficulties they have created for themselves by attaching themselves to zero tolerance à la Mexicana. Perhaps a humanized version will emerge. At stake is the security of the city’s citizens as well as the presidential ambitions of the city’s mayor.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jordi Pius Llopart is a human rights lawyer and a staffer at NACLA. He has worked with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights’project on policing in Mexico.
