MEXICO CITY — The initiative to reform the Constitution, that would implement a new system of public security in the country, has a 95 percent consensus among the major political parties represented in the Senate.
The new model gives rise to the Unified Police Command, which would not eliminate municipal police, contrary to the spirit of the initiative presented by President Enrique Peña Nieto to the Senate last December.
Fernando Yunes Márquez, president of the Justice Commission, said the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN) and the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), agreed to entirely dismiss the president’s initiative, which guaranteed public safety through the State Unified Police Command.
Municipal police forces will be maintained, provided they meet certain quality standards”
— Fernando Ynes Márquez, Justice Commission president
The PAN said Unified Command is passed to the Joint Police Command in the remaining municipal police forces, but remains subject to control by certain quality standards to allow their operation.
Yunes Márquez said that the “heart” of this initiative to amend the Constitution must be approved by both chambers of Congress, and will have to be ratified by the states’ legislatures.
“Municipal police forces will be maintained, provided they meet certain quality standards; standards to be established, reviewed and approved by the National Public Security System,” he said.
Yunes Márquez said that with this flexible model, police forces that have been “infiltrated” by organized crime may request the intervention of superior level forces in the hierarchy.
“Where municipalities are under their own control, threats of organized crime or for any other reason may also voluntarily leave their municipal police at the hands of the state,” he said.
“But it is also a model with checks and balances, where those states or municipalities, again, that do not meet quality standards, where the police are taken over by crime or are not ‘clean,’ can be usurped by the next higher level. That is, municipalities or municipal police by state governments and state police by the federal government.”