https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3336-1748
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ABSTRACT
It is now established that elements in policing bodies’ socio-political environments influence officers’ beliefs, values, and attitudes. Paradoxically, however, the prevailing view within mainstream research is that police communities are also inward-facing entities that are withdrawn from the cultural context outside their realm. One limitation of this perspective is that it precludes researchers from examining how entities from this ‘outer world’ intermingle with policing bodies as well as how this interaction impacts upon manifestations of police culture. In Mexico criminal and police networks appear to be highly interconnected. Indeed, numerous members of Mexico’s law enforcement institutions are active participants in the web-like ties that connect individuals involved in the country’s criminal enterprises. By analysing the narratives of former members of Mexico’s Federal Police, I contend that officers’ perceptions of the intermingling between police and organised crime networks shape the culture of law-enforcement groups tasked with combating organised crime.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. David Décary-Hétu for his valuable feedback on this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These three agencies were the Federal Highways Police, the Federal Fiscal Police, and the Immigration Police.
2 Two of the people I interviewed as part of this study have since been indicted by US courts. At least two other participants have since been investigated by the Mexican courts for their participation in criminal networks.
3 These criteria excluded FP officers assigned to administrative units and officers in units that did not focus directly on tackling organised crime, such as search and rescue and forensics teams.
4 Mexico’s FP comprised seven divisions: Intelligence, Investigation, Regional Security, Scientific, Anti-drugs, Federal Forces, and Gendarmerie.
5 All of the former officers I contacted directly accepted my interview requests. After I obtained authorisation from the FP to interview active-duty officers in the anti-drugs division, I received a list of 24 agents who volunteered to participate in my study and who met my selection criteria. However, I do not know how the FP disseminated information about my study to potential participants.
6 I am a native Spanish speaker from Mexico.
7 Field officers described their everyday work as involving a range of tasks, such as writing reports, making court appearances, identifying, and surveilling people and locations, recruiting informants, organising and carrying out raids. The analysis officers described their work as a process that entailed processing, interpreting, and relaying data from both open and confidential sources.
8 The identifiers I use are not the officers’ real names. The interviews were approved by the University of Toronto’s research ethics committee. The FP’s anti-drugs division allowed me to take notes of my conversations with its employees but did not authorise me to record audio or video of the conversations.
9 The FP’s anti-drugs division staff informed me that the agency reserved the rights to monitor all interviews I carried out within its premises.
10 For decades, the border city of Ciudad Juarez has been at the forefront of violent struggles between criminal networks, fighting over the allocation of transnational drug smuggling routes.
11 In his study of police corruption in Mexico, Garduno (Citation2019) explains how practices such as the ‘code of silence’ can be conducive to social learning processes that favour deviant behaviours by presenting them as normal or even desirable.
12 This is the author’s representation of the theorised overlap between the FP and an unspecified criminal network. It is not meant to depict an empirical case.