The Contemporary Mexico City Police

Abstract

The preceding chapter, by offering a theoretically informed historical narrative analysis of the Mexican state formation process, outlined, on an abstract level, basic features of Mexico’s negotiated state and their impact on Mexican policing. The remaining parts of this study, beginning with this chapter, will turn to the question of how these ‘most abstract, although essential relations’ (Lefebvre 2003: 79) of Mexico’s negotiated state unfold in Mexico City, how they shape the structures and practices of local policing as well as the resulting citizen-police relations. The present chapter will set the stage for this endeavor. It will first provide an overview of the formal institutional structure of the contemporary Mexico City police forces and the legal framework of local policing. By addressing these issues, the present chapter, in addition to approaching the Mexican state’s formal-legal self-imagination with regards to its role as a public security provider, also serves as an analytical entry point for assessing the de facto workings of Mexico City policing. Addressing the latter issue implies looking beyond formal aspects and identifying the degree of structural ‘compliance’ with or ‘deviation’ from formally established structures, rules and procedures in routine police activities. This will be done in the second part of this chapter, where I will turn to the actual practices of the local police forces and the resulting citizen-police relations. A brief conclusion will then summarize the main findings of this chapter. The argument to be developed in the following pages is that notwithstanding extensive legal regulations, the institutional design and the internal culture of the local police forces, stemming from their embeddedness within Mexico’s negotiated state, contribute to a highly fragmented and selective form of security provision, marked by high levels of unpublicness, informality and arbitrariness.