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Mexican president wants to scrap city-level police units
President Felipe Calderón's administration wants to dissolve Mexico's 2,022 city police forces, saying many of them are so badly educated and vulnerable to corruption that they are undermining the country's crackdown on drug cartels.The proposal was announced by Public Safety Secretary Genaro García Luna as he released gloomy new statistics on Mexico's battle against crime. The country's murder rate rose from 9.69 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2007 to 14.72 in 2009, nearly triple the U.S. rate of 5.6. Cocaine use in Mexico has quadrupled since 2006, and methamphetamine use has quintupled, García Luna said, despite a massive, U.S.-backed buildup in federal police. The government wants to replace Mexico's 160,967 municipal police officers with bigger state police forces and is lobbying governors for their support, García Luna told lawmakers during a congressional hearing late last week. Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-01-27 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=288972 |