In Mexico City, Few Cheers for Giuliani

MEXICO CITY – When this crime-ridden capital city announced it was bringing in Mayor Giuliani and his private consulting firm to advise its police, it was big news not only in New York and Mexico but all over the world. “Giuliani to the rescue” was the headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Followed by legions of cameras, Mr. Giuliani spent a day-and-a-half in January 2003 touring Mexico City’s danger and tourist zones, protected by a motorcade of a dozen bulletproof sport utility vehicles, 400 officers, and a helicopter. “He was mobbed and cheered and was a tremendous hero,” Michael Hess, a top Giuliani aide, told The New York Sun.Two years later, the cheering has stopped. In January 2005, Mexico City’s new police chief, Joel Ortega, told local reporters, “I am no fan of Giuliani.” Far from the 67% drop in homicides achieved during Mr. Giuliani’s mayoralty in New York, which was touted in a Giuliani Partners press release announcing its Mexico City contract, the homicide rate in Mexico’s capital slipped less than 1% in 2004. Kidnappings in which the victim is driven from ATM to ATM to withdraw money are on the rise, with some security firms saying Mexico is now rivaling Colombia as kidnapping capital of the world.The Giuliani team ended up being paid less than the $4.3 million that was widely reported as the price for the work, and it was not hired for a follow-up project to implement its recommendations. In interviews with the Sun, several former Mexican police officials and current officers were sharply critical of the Giuliani effort, though Mr. Hess said he considers the project “very successful.”As Mr. Giuliani considers a presidential bid in 2008 and as he tries to grow his consulting business, the Mexico City episode may well attract additional scrutiny from Mr. Giuliani’s critics in America. It is still short of the four years Mr. Giuliani said would be needed to assess the effects of the consultation, but some of the challenges Giuliani Partners encountered transferring New York City police know-how to Mexico City are already apparent.“We weren’t necessarily in the same symphony,” said Monica Rojas, who worked closely on the project as the deputy director of the statistics department of the Mexico City police department. “Each side had a different interest,” she said, speaking by telephone in Spanish from Barcelona, Spain, where she now lives. “The ideas and the concepts they conveyed to us, but they never explained how to achieve them.”“They were not prepared, not at all,” said another former Mexico City police official who worked closely with the Giuliani team, Antonio Rendon. “They weren’t consultants, they were retired policemen. And they were trying to organize another police force, but not with a methodology or a clear idea.”Mr. Rendon, who is now director of Mexico operations for Kroll, a private security company, said that late payments from the Mexicans to the Giuliani group exacerbated problems. “The relationship started to become a bit tense,” he said. “They were not really looking forward, it was, ‘where’s the money?'”“The Giuliani plan did not have any effect. It was money in the trash, really,” said a police officer patrolling the central square here earlier this month, Nicocio Acosto Leon. “Better to buy arms, uniforms, to fix our vehicles because we have to do that ourselves.”Another uniformed officer on patrol, Gabriel Milan, was skeptical that Mr. Giuliani’s efforts had achieved any results. “They say crime has gone down 10% but it’s a lie. It’s gone up. Daily kidnappings, rapes, car robberies.” He said the bulletproof vest he was wearing was so old that it was no longer effective.Mr. Giuliani has not returned here since his visit in January 2003. But groups of his aides assigned to the project took more than 20 trips to Mexico City over the course of 10 months. They worked under the mandate that Mr. Giuliani issued when he announced the contract in October of 2002. “Sure, there are differences between New York City and Mexico City,” he said then, “but I’m not sure those differences are relevant to crime reduction.”Members of the Giuliani team said they quickly discovered they were up against some serious challenges unlike what they faced in New York. Starting salary for Mexico City police officers is $6,000, compared to $34,000 in New York City. Most residents do not trust the police, who are infamous for extortion and taking bribes known as mordidas, or nibbles. Only an estimated 10% of crimes are reported. And the local police, a preventive force, is only able to investigate crimes when they are in the process of occurring. If a resident comes in to report a crime from 10 minutes ago, the police cannot do anything.Giuliani Partners executives say that they may have been a victim of inflated, perhaps even unrealistically high, expectations. “Certainly when you talk to so many people in Mexico City who were either victims of crime themselves, or know people who were victims of crime, and they were tired of being victims, there was an expectation that things could change immediately,” said a vice president of Giuliani Partners, Maureen Casey. “But certainly none of us, including the mayor, have the authority or the ability to do an immediate turnaround.”“We were down there, I would say, two weeks a month for almost a year, and essentially what we did was to study each aspect of the police department in Mexico City,” Ms. Casey said. “We really tried to do a balance of the academic research and also real hands-on learning, and I think that is what served us the best. Really getting out in the field, spending time on patrol, learning aspects of the criminal justice system.”It did not take long for a mixture of culture clash and differing objectives to begin to wear at the working relationship, former members of the Mexico City team said. A BBC documentary following the project chronicled tensions and tempers created by a Mexican police force in a state of disarray – few computers, rare fax machines, cars not working, an unmotivated and underpaid work force – that was often hostile to new ideas generated by the consulting team.The working relationship effectively ended in August of 2003, after the Mexico City police department decided, without permission from New York, to translate into Spanish and release 146 recommendations based on Giuliani Partners consulting. That came as the group of Mexico City businessmen financing the project, late on payments, paid up less than the widely reported $4.3 million contract price. Mexico City’s police chief at the time, Marcelo Ebrard, took to the airwaves and said they were accepting all of the recommendations. He said he anticipated a 10% decrease in crime for each of the next three years.“We left on good terms, but I guess you can consider it a breach of contract,” said a former consultant with Giuliani Partners who worked on the project, John Picciano. “You’re not making your payments as you said. It’s not inexpensive to fly to Mexico.” Mr. Picciano said the Mexican clients “kind of ran out of money.”Mr. Hess declined to say how much of the fee was paid.Not all Mexicans were critical of the Giuliani team’s work, and even some of the critics said that some of the work was valuable. “For us it was a very good experience,” said Mario Delgado, the top aide to the former police chief, Marcelo Ebrard. Mr. Ebrard, who had brought in the Giuliani team, was fired by the president late last year after two undercover police officers were lynched by a mob.“The Giuliani consultation was very well done,” said a prominent real estate magnate and volunteer anti-crime organizer here, Fernando Schutte. “Now what is missing is to do something.”“I think it was very, very positive for the Mexico police to have a full program,” Mr. Rendon said.After the Giuliani team recommended using breathalyzers to enforce laws against drunk driving, the Mexico City police started doing that for the first time. At least some of the Giuliani team’s recommendations made it into a city law that passed last August. Among them was an effort to improve order by targeting illegal street vendors and the windshield washers known as squeegee men that Mr. Giuliani famously conquered as mayor of New York.In response to the law, squeegee men organized a march to protest that the “Giuliani law,” as it is sometimes called, was taking away their livelihood.Armed with a green plastic soda bottle filled with soapy water, Lorenzo Hernandez, a 17-year-old who said he has been washing windows since he was 5, was back on the streets earlier this month. “The government doesn’t go after us after the march,” he said, noting that on a good day he earns almost $5 washing car windows.Outside police headquarters is a market of illegal vendors so crowded that it slows pedestrian traffic to the subway to a crawl. Officers pass by without a second look. In a city where an estimated 40% of residents earn their living in the informal economy, a crackdown on this type of trade is a tremendous undertaking.“These are the new laws, but it’s almost never enforced,” said a police officer, Rene Sanchez.Giuliani’s TipsIn August of 2003 the Mexico City police force released 146 recommendations based on the consulting work of Giuliani Partners. A sampling follows:1-10. The development of a Compstat system.Combining the use of statistical and mapping information with the management, review, and accountability platform known as Compstat; create incentives and consequences for officers and commanders to catalyze a process of decentralizing decision-making.Use undercover officers to detect and prevent robberies in selected zones.18. Eliminate pirate taxis, which are a risk to their passengers.24. Create an auto-theft prevention program where vehicle parts are registered with the local police.29. Install cameras at critical points using Compstat results to identify high-crime areas.32. Control of drug distribution should be enhanced; seize homes, vehicles, and installations that contribute to the distribution of drugs on the streets.Revise the criteria by which the police force decides if the detained individual is an addict or a dealer.63. Improve the quality of life of police officers, such as providing opportunities to study and medical benefits.70. Reintroduce on-the-job training.103. Create a GPS system to assign patrols to crime sites.107. Equip precinct offices with fax and photocopy machines.117. Use breathalyzers, establishing review points in the city where the blood-alcohol level of drivers is evaluated.121. Create controlled public sites for artistic graffiti, as part of a larger recovery strategy.123. Control the proliferation of franeleros, self-appointed parking attendants, and squeegee men, by identifying them and creating mechanisms to prevent their proliferation.124. Monitor indigent street children, create shelters for high risk and addiction cases.

In Mexico City, Few Cheers for Giuliani

In Mexico City, Few Cheers for Giuliani

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