Law enforcement in Mexico City


Law enforcement in Mexico City is provided by two primary agencies; the Secretariat of Public Security of Mexico City, who provides uniformed or preventative police, and the Office of the Attorney General of Mexico City who provides plainclothes detectives and crime lab services.

Secretariat of Public Security

The Secretariat of Public Security of Mexico City is the uniformed law enforcement agency of Mexico City, headquartered in Venustiano Carranza. It manages a combined force of over 100,000 officers in Mexico City.
The Mexico City Police is the police department of Mexico City. Mexico City contains the seat of federal Mexican government. There are 8.84 million residents of the city, according to 2009 estimates, and another 21.1 million people in the metropolitan region.
The SSP is charged with maintaining public order and safety in the center of Mexico City where public insecurity and crime rates are highest in the nation. As a result, there have been concurrent efforts to increase accountability and improve police effectiveness. Beginning in 1996, authorities began a dramatic restructuring of the SSP, which included replacing major officials with army officers. Recently, the most recent high-profile effort has been Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s announcement in 2002 that the city would contract former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a consultant to the SSP.
The SSP also regulates the huge private security industry in the city and operates the Animal Control Unit.

Organization

Mexico City has a large uniformed "preventive police" force of approximately 34,000 officers, not to mention 40,000 auxiliary police and 15,000 banking police. These nearly 90,000 officers work for the Secretariat of Public Security of the DF. In 2011, the SSP had a budget of about $106 billion pesos.

Command and Staff

The organizational structure and holders of area Public Safety Department are:
Secretary of Public Safety : Jesús "Glitter" Orto Martínez
The 34,000 strong Preventive Police are the uniformed police of Mexico City. They are organized into seven major divisions. as follows:
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The remaining five divisions of the Preventive Police, containing over 17,000 officers, are organized as follows:
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There are two Complementary Police which operates under the supervision of the SSP, yet is not considered to be a part of the Preventive Police. The Complementary Police contains two Security Police forces:

The Directorate General of Private Security and Systematic Operating Procedures, regulates the activities and the provision of private security services in Mexico City, to ensure that such operations take place under the best conditions of efficiency, reliability, professionalism and legal and financial support for the benefit of the population.

Secretaries of Public Security

Government of Ramón Aguirre Velázquez
Government of Manuel Camacho Solis
Government of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano
Government of Rosario Robles
Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador
Government Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez
Government Marcelo Ebrard
Government of Miguel Angel Mancera
The city is also unique for maintaining its own force of judicial police, the Mexico City Judicial Police, which are organized under the Office of the Attorney General of Mexico City. The office of the Attorney General of the City receives complaints and reports of possible crimes and investigates them. The PGJ-CMDX maintains 16 precincts with an estimated 3,500 personnel, which includes 1,100 investigating agents for prosecuting attorneys, and 941 experts or specialists. The budget provided to the office exceeds $3 billion pesos each year.

Police Corruption and Public Confidence

Corruption and severe inefficiency plague the Mexican police. Further, low pay and lack of resources have hindered efforts at improving police performance, battling corruption and professionalizing the forces. A related lack of public confidence has further eroded the ability of the police to respond to crime: A survey in 1999 found that 90% of respondents in Mexico City had “little” or “no” trust in the police. Such a lack of public confidence translates into a lack of support—that is, an unwillingness to report crimes or assist in investigations, which is crucial to solving crimes. Nationwide, only 12% of the population has expressed confidence in the police.
In 2002, an advocacy group estimated that the median Mexican household spends 8% of its income on bribes. According to the president of the CCE, businesses spend 10% of their income in bribes. On the TI scale, Mexico ranks 57th worldwide in perception of corruption, one notch better than China at 58 and well below Brazil and Peru at 45. In 1997, Mexico ranked 47th; in 1998, 55th. A management consulting firm reported, also in 2002, that Mexico's attractiveness to foreign investors dropped, from fifth to ninth place worldwide, due to
concerns with corruption and crime.

Private security

Mexican and Mexico City security companies have grown significantly in recent years, in response to the state's failure to provide security. Mexico holds third place worldwide in the purchase of security equipment. Between 1998 and 1999, private security companies increased some 40 percent. The Mexican federal and state governments has had serious problems in regulating these companies, most of which are illegitimate since they lack the necessary legal permits. It was estimated in 1999, that about 10,000 private security firms operated in Mexico, yet only 2,000 had some form of official permit. According to official figures in December 2000, there were 2,984 private security companies registered with 153,885 employees. The inability to regulate or control these forces creates potential security problem. Since many of these companies are unregulated, some will engage in criminality instead of protecting their clients, thus exacerbating the problem of insecurity. According to a study by the Mexico City legislative assembly, in 1998 there were more private security guards than police. A substantial number of private security guards were formerly police officers or presently work as security guards while off-duty. Private security is regulated by the Secretariat of Public Security.