By: Negin Etemad
Due to a lack of state security, Mexico has had an outbreak of violence and civilians are teaming up to provide their city with civilian policing tactics. Civilian policing started a few weeks ago when residents used rifles and machetes to arrest three dozen people who they claim that public law enforcement failed to arrest themselves. After this outbreak of civilian policing, this movement has spread throughout the country by movement leaders and local human rights officials who promote communities patrolling and policing themselves since public law enforcement seems to be absent. This kind of civilian policing is pretty common in Mexico considering there are large drug and organized crime problems that public law enforcement don't take care of. The civilians have built their own checkpoints, they investigate the offenses and hold public trials.
This article was interesting to me since we learned in class that civilians can actually make arrests and act as a private police of their community. In Mexico City, public law enforcement is generally absent or corrupt. An example of this is the shootout that happened last summer in the Mexico City airport between two forces of police. One group of police were helping the drug trade by allowing the transportation of drugs on the airplanes, and the other group were there to arrest them, which is when the shootout took place. This shocked me because I didn't know there was still police corruption like this going on today. This shows that the public law enforcement in Mexico is not very reliable and that is why the civilians of certain communities in Mexico need to stand up and police for their own communities.
The question I raise is whether or not people are complying with the citizens who have chosen to police their community. In class Professor Musheno brought to our attention why people comply with legal authorities, and that is by coercion or threatening sanctions, utility, legitimacy and trust. Public police have an authority of the state and they are able to threaten sanctions on people, but most people don't believe that private citizens are capable of doing the same thing. They may not be able to send people to jail, but they can certainly can detain a criminal and then have public law enforcement deal with them when they get there. At first when I learned about citizens arrests and civilian policing, I didn't really take it seriously because I didn't think anyone would actually listen to or obey the actions of a fellow citizen trying to arrest a person, because they are not the public actors who have a badge and are authorities of the state. But after reading this article it made me look at civilian policing differently and I believe that it does work and in this case may be the only form of law enforcement in a certain city or country. Due to the corruption in Mexico City, the communities which have come together and formed civilian policing units are doing a great service for their city, however, it still has the same dangers that public law enforcement face on a daily basis. It is for that reason alone why most communities don't police themselves and trust that public law enforcement will handle everything, which as you see from this news article, isn't necessarily true.
That is a tough one. Your choice of articles is interesting and poses a new way of thinking about policing and legitimacy—it definitively grabbed my attention. I like how you are thinking outside the box or in this case outside the border. Three things came to mind: (1) what prompts people to police their communities more...a breakdown and distrust of law enforcement or the abandonment of one's government? (2) Could there possibly be a push factor into some of these rural areas? (3) Are there any similar stories about citizens taking control of their communities in the U.S?
ReplyDeleteI think your article said it best “Many of these communities have long harbored suspicion of the state; indeed some consider themselves autonomous from Mexico, which at times has granted them de facto self-rule." This is something I found to be very interesting. What happens when a community does not feel a part of the rest of the nation? What happens when a police force or government is not representative of the people they serve? What happens when they fail to protect citizens who are most vulnerable: rural communities and inner-city neighborhoods?
Citizens must take action that is either preventative or reactionary to failed bureaucracy. In the 1960s-1980s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) sought preventative solutions when the government failed to step in. The BPP created a host of community programs in inner-cities neighborhoods from free health clinics to free breakfast programs. An example of reactionary style civilian policing can be tied back to the LAPD and the L.A Riots, when Korean Merchants began taking up arms because the LAPD was doing very little to protect their stores.
I think in the case of indigenous people of Mexico’s rural parts they are employing both forms: arming themselves with weapons and knowledge of their rights and powers. It also appears that the lack of law enforcement combined with poverty creates an ideal situation for criminal minds. If all the forces are heavily protecting Mexico City then who is left to protect everyone else not in Mexico City? It sounds like a lack of resources creates a need for marginalized communities to get resourceful.
I definitely agree with your point that the legitimacy of a citizen police force would be based on the inadequacy and corruption of the public law enforcement. I would assume that public cooperation with civilian police comes from a collective understanding that some kind of authoritative force is necessary in order to fill in the void between public law enforcement and citizens living in impoverished areas.
ReplyDeleteAs Professor Musheno stated in lecture, the majority of residents living in areas with high criminal activity zones are actually law abiding citizens. Therefore, even if those individuals being arrested don't respect the authority of the civilian police, the majority of citizens may be supporting the civilian police's use of force in order to apprehend criminals.
This is very interesting. How would we distinguish vigilantism from legitimate citizen policing? Professor Musheno
ReplyDeleteThis is an incredibly interesting article! I really like how you have described the merits of civilian policing. I still have some serious concerns about it though. The questions I have revolve around power and corruption. How will civilians resist incentives to make more money/participate in criminal activity? What mechanisms will be in place to regulate suspicious behavior? Furthermore I wonder if all of them have the adequate firearms training. It is definitely an idea that is worth exploring and can work in certain contexts.
ReplyDeleteCivilians taking up arms and policing themselves can be effective in a society where the LEO don't step up and act as police. However these civilians are leaving themselves vulnerable from many different sources. They don't go through the same legal training police do, so they can easily overstep their bounds legally and end up in jail themselves. They also leave themselves vulnerable to the criminals that they arrest seeking retribution for the arrest.
ReplyDeleteI believe this form of civilian policing is similar to putting a bandaid on an arterial wound, it might stop a bit of the bleeding, but it wont be able to actually fix the wound and clean up the streets. If the civilians start to also take a political path to help clean up corruption in the police departments, then real change can start to happen. The civilians policing themselves wont bring real changes on their own, they need help from the political sphere.
As a result of Mexico's drug cartel war, policing seems to be taking place by everyone except their own sworn in officers (because of both fear and corruption), which is extremely problematic. First off, the citizens are put in extreme harms way by policing themselves against Mexico's extremely violent criminals whom they are no match against. Also, foreign nations, such as the United States, try to impose their own "solutions," such as our "Fast and Furious" operation with Mexico. The ATF operation not only failed miserable, but supplied Mexico with thousands of untraceable guns from the United States, heavily contributing to the violence throughout Mexico. The only real solution is for Mexico to gain a legitimate police force who will actively fight violence and corruption, rather than contribute to it.
ReplyDelete~Adriana Regalado
I think what has happened in Mexico is a message relayed all over the world when people lose faith in their law enforcement service. All over the world people have taken the law into their own hands when they feel that those whose job it is to protect them can not do that. This highlights the importance of a service maintaining legitimacy through the people, because if they don't feel you are protecting them, can you really call yourself 'enforcers of the law'?
ReplyDeleteJanat Kiwanuka
Negin,
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting blog and article, and I think it also is relevant in the context of U.S. policing and the right to carry a gun and self-policing. With the growing mistrust toward public law enforcement and the notion that officers are not able to protect civilians, many communities start taking up the role of the police themselves. Whereas I believe that in a state of emergency, as it seems to be in Mexican communities, taking up this role and being an active citizen might be necessary and even life-saving, in my opinion the legitimacy of such civilian policing stays very limited as the civilians lack the training and expertise. Without this knowledge their actions quite possibly won't be lawful and just; on the contrary, civilian policing can easily result in revengeful actions that can provoke even worse conflicts and lacerations within the country.
It is important, I think, to refrain from painting a romantic image of the heroic civilian who fights for justice, while condemning the public police as untrustworthy, incompetent, and applying inappropriate measures because civilians are nothing more than officers without the training but probably more personal involvement, which sounds pretty dangerous to me.
Michaela Pluskovich
I think that this is a very interesting and well written blog. However, I do not think that people policing themselves is the answer. I think that while private citizens policing their areas can be effective for short periods of time, that it will ultimately lead to even more corruption and disorganization because these individuals are not properly trained to execute any of the duties they are trying to implement. I think that this situation is sad because it shows the ultimate results of an untrustworthy police force and how ineffective they can be, but I think that what is needed is a start towards remaking the policing system so that is more trustworthy rather than relying on regular citizens to patrol the streets.
ReplyDeleteI think that is a very nice article to write for your blog. I also agree that we did learn in class that civilians can actually make arrests and act as a private police of their community. I think that civilians can make a difference in our community by setting an example.
ReplyDeleteThis blog raises an interesting question regarding the legitimacy of citizen arrest. As Professor Musheno pointed out in class several times, no authority can rely solely on force in order to establish legitimacy. The Mexican public police have certainly proven this point, and the fact that they still engage in widespread bribery doesn't help the situation. Having lost their own legitimacy, however, I don't necessarily believe that citizen arrest can replace it. The reason citizen arrest can occasionally work in the United States is because it isn't engaged in as frequently as you are describing here, and this situation in Mexico to me looks like another attempt to establish legitimacy solely through force. Or perhaps these citizens aren't even concerned with legitimacy at all, in which case I agree with Professor Musheno's comment that this may lean more toward acts of vigilantism. Thank you for picking such an interesting topic!
ReplyDelete-Molly Ruiz