HONEST COPS THE GOAL OF MEXICAN ACADEMY

New Breed Trained to Fight Corruption Rooted in Police Culture

MEXICO CITY - Since he was a child, Israel Martinez Bermudez has
wanted to become something relatively rare in a nation fraught with
centuries-old corruption: an honest and able cop.

But the image of police as corrupt and abusive stopped him.

Now 31, the former sociology major and hospital worker believes that
opportunity is here at a small police academy in a gritty part of
Mexico City, where he's halfway through a yearlong detective program
for the capital's Judicial Police.

"Here they are teaching us a new way of doing things for a new
generation," he said, "and it's time for us to do our part." Also Online

As the U.S. considers an estimated $1 billion, three-year aid package
to help Mexico bolster its fight against drug traffickers and
organized crime, police trainers and analysts warn that money alone
will not solve the country's problem with endemic corruption.

The government needs to change the law enforcement culture from a
self-serving institution to a public service operation, experts say.

In the last decade, the Mexican government has spent billions of
dollars on law enforcement with no real improvement either in
efficiency or in rooting out bad cops, analysts said.

The result has been simply to give better equipment to the same
corrupt officers, said Jose Arturo Yanez Romero, an instructor at the
academy, called the Professional Formation Institute.

"Even if it were $2 billion," he said of the potential U.S. aid,
"it's not going to change anything in a substantial way. You'll see
police driving around in fancy trucks in tiny villages, but that's about it."

That's where the police academy comes in.

Mr. Yanez said the academy focuses first on finding the right people
to join law enforcement and then providing them with intense training.

For example, former or current police officers - or anyone who has
served in the military - are unwelcome at the institute because they
are perceived as already tainted.

Students must have two years of university studies, go through a
battery of psychological tests and submit to home visits by academy
officials, who also interview neighbors and friends.

During his first State of the Union address this month, President
Felipe Calderon proposed deep changes in Mexican security forces.

"In our frontal assault on crime, the modernization of our security
laws and institutions cannot be postponed," Mr. Calderon said.

On Monday, Public Security Minister Genaro Garcia Luna said the
federal government has begun an ambitious program for a national
academy that would essentially retrain all of Mexico's 400,000 police,

But he also acknowledged the enormity of the task, with or without U.S. aid.

"[Historically] the police were completely abandoned," he told The
Dallas Morning News. "We have to confront corruption."

Jorge Chabat, a professor of international studies and political
commentator, said Mr. Calderon is doing the right thing by asking
Americans to participate financially in the drug fight south of their border.

"It's a problem shared by both countries, and the United States has a
lot more money," Mr. Chabat said.

The U.S. also is worried about terrorists, human smugglers and
Central American gangs, he said.

"It's a good idea for the U.S. to give us this money," he said. "The
only problem is the corruption."

OLD TRICK

In June, Mr. Calderon reassigned the top 284 police officials from
the two federal security forces, the Federal Preventative Police and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

While some analysts, like Mr. Chabat, praised the measure, Mr. Yanez
said the reshuffling or "recycling" of police commanders is an old
trick that has not been effective.

The "express" training of military soldiers for law enforcement duty
is another failed tactic.

State and local police, who make up 95 percent of the 350,000
officers nationwide, often receive even less training.

And it shows.

More than 220 police nationwide have been killed in the last 18
months, most by drug cartels, Mr. Yanez said. Whether those slain
police were corrupt and part of the ongoing cartel turf war or just
symbols of government authority is something Mexicans will never know.

"The biggest tragedy, separate from the deaths themselves, is that
there are no investigations, no one arrested for these police
killings and none for the more than 3,000 people executed in a year
and a half," he said.

Mr. Yanez was part of an earlier attempt to reform police forces
nationwide. He was a founder of the National System of Public
Security, designed to overhaul the financial and academic conditions
of all regular and investigative police in Mexico and improve their weaponry.

"We started with the hypothesis that the police needed much more
money, and we spent a lot more on public security," he said. "And now
we know our hypothesis was false."

The police academy is trying a different approach, seeking educated,
principled cadets and giving them the tools to resist the temptation
of easy money, officials say.

Instructors at the Mexico City police academy try to create a safe
haven, an ethical environment where they prepare their young charges
for a police environment where informal "uses and customs" trump
internal regulations, not to mention laws and the constitution.

The institute has a university feel to it, with classrooms filled
with well-dressed recruits who salute their instructors and are
painfully polite. In the afternoon, students change into sweatsuits
for the physical part of their yearlong training.

With about 100 graduates a year over nine years, Mr. Yanez says these
new generations of judicial police are beginning to change the
institution as their ranks grow, rejecting corrupt practices or
engrained traditions, such as new recruits being forced to wash a
commander's car, academy officials said.

'Change the Concept'

Of the approximately 1,000 academy graduates, only three have been
accused of crimes, said academic director Mauricio Abizaid Perez.

"I know a lot of police who have done their jobs well," he said.

But Mr. Chabat, the political analyst, remains skeptical. "The entire
system is designed to make it easier for a person to give a bribe
than to follow the law," he said.

Academy cadet Andres Corona Diaz, 22, gave up law school for police
work and said that not everyone in his family understood.

"There's this idea that the Judicial Police is corrupt and that I
could become corrupt as well," he said, rejecting the idea.

His future salary of $1,200 per month is enough to live on along with
his wife's salary. They have three children.

"First and foremost, I want to serve the people," he said.

Veronica Mora Nochebuena, 34 and an orthodontist by training, wants
"to be a policewoman even though my parents don't like it."

"We have to change the concept of what police are," she said.

Mr. Martinez, the police cadet who studied sociology, said honest
people can change a corrupt system.

"I am trying to do my small part," he said. "This is not about the
money but about doing something useful with my life." Within the
Judicial Police, "we are going to be the majority someday."

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BAD REPUTATION

The public face of the police, one of Mexico's least-respected
institutions, remains that of corruption and ineptitude, with almost
daily media scandals.

In the last month:

Federal police in the state of Queretero were accused of taking
bribes from vendors of illegal goods in exchange for information
about future operations against them.

Four officers of an elite Mexico City unit allegedly used their
patrol pickups to stop and rob truck drivers of their merchandise,
the police department said.

Two federal anti-drug officers were kidnapped, tortured and killed in
the Mexico-Texas border state of Nuevo Leon after heading to a gas
station to bathe because the state police academy where they were
staying lacked running water, media reports said.

An opinion poll found that 11 percent of Mexicans said they had paid
a bribe to police in the last three months. The poll was conducted by
Consulta Mitofsky for the citizens group Mexico United Against Crime.

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BY THE NUMBERS

$3 billion: What Mexico will spend on law enforcement this year - a
third higher than in 2006

$1 billion: The amount of aid that the U.S. is considering giving Mexico

350,000: The number of officers nationwide

284: The number of top police officials that Mexican President Felipe
Calderon reassigned from the Federal Preventative Police and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation

220: Police officers killed nationwide in the last 18 months, most by
drug cartels