Between Chaos and Order: A Mexican Crime Prevention Success Story

Sonora is Mexico’s second largest state, characterized by a large desert and a dispersed population.  It borders with Arizona to the North, the Sea of Cortes to the West and three Mexican states that are home to different drug cartels: Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Baja California Norte.  And yet, Sonora has radically reduced crime in the past year: Rape has decreased by 26%, Family Violence 34%, Assault 17%, House burglary 22%, and Robbery has reduced 30%.

These decreases are impressive if we compare Sonora to the rest of Mexico where violent crime is on the rise and has forced President Calderon to hold an extraordinary meeting with his Security Council and all of Mexico’s state governors.

But Sonora is not complacent, it is just way ahead.

Two years ago, Governor Eduardo Bours named Francisco Figueroa as Secretary of Security - one of his closest advisors. Figueroa sketched out a plan and invited me over to take a look in November 2006.

I didn’t like his plan and said so.  Not that it lacked substance, but it looked like most of the plans that I see in Mexico - full of activities with no focus or measures of outputs or outcomes, and so with no clear method of evaluation.

I showed him what we had achieved in Nuevo Leon and Tabasco in the nineties and explained the fundamentals of our method.

• We would focus on outcomes: crime statistics. Not all crimes, only those that were significant.
• We would measure and proactively publish on a monthly basis. We would use graphs, easy to read by anyone.
• We needed Governor Bours to publicly announce his commitment to reduce crime by at least 25%. No politician in Mexico had done this before.
• We would define a statistical profile of each crime: Where, what day of the week and what hour of the day. Some crimes, like rape, assault and car theft would require a more detailed profile.
• We would focus only on those municipalities and neighborhoods that comprised 80% of the problem: the Pareto Principle.
• We would need to team up with many other state and municipal government offices, and particularly with the troublesome neighborhoods.

Bottom-line: we would empower the media and the people. We would flood the system with relevant information. We would open-up to constant accountability. We would put ethics in front of politics.

What were we striving for? To enhance the system’s preventive intelligence. Not just the police, but the whole system.

Figueroa showed interest and I became interested in his interest.

I had given up government consultancy years ago because political leadership in Mexico is extremely scarce.  Innovation, ethics and accountability are not popular words for politicians.

-Why 25%? He asked.

-Because 25% will force us to change the system. We can try 50% if you like, its been done, but I wouldn’t advise it at this moment.

By the end of the presentation he was willing to explore. I had one condition: Governor Bours had to support the plan all the way.  He agreed.

After some initial months of data searching and probing on our part, we created a set of traffic lights for each crime: green if we were within the goal, red if we were above the historical average and yellow if we were in between.  A format anyone could understand and evaluate. Not tables, graphs. Not absolute numbers, percentages; a right-side brain approach.

At a State Security Council meeting in March 27 of 2007, Governor Bours went public with this simple plan.

The surface looked calm, the undercurrent paradigm-shift was immense:

• Politicians love to hide information unless it is good news. We would publish systematically.
• Politicians do not like to empower people.  We would empower the media and the people.
• Politicians consider the media their enemy. The media was part of the team.
• Politicians love to concentrate on activity and announce spectacular strategies. We would start with sharing the problem and let everyone decide and help. This was the strategy.
• Politicians avoid compromising on outcomes. We had a public goal: Easy to understand, difficult to accomplish.
• Politicians hate difficult goals. We did not know if we were capable of accomplishing it but willing to try.
• Politicians love to control. We had no control whatsoever. We did have a clear task: to find data and transform it into useful information.

The Mayors of the most important cities and municipalities of Sonora (the Pareto group), accepted in public and complained in private. They had a good reason for doing so. They were to be evaluated. Sonora has a state police, but most of crime prevention and law enforcement is in the hands of the mayors.  

I knew we were on the right track.

Every month I facilitated the evaluation meetings in Sonora.

The first meeting would be with the state authorities. Not only the Secretary and the state police, but we also included heads of offices as diverse as Art, Sports, Education, Health, Family, Youth, etc.  We would look at the crime rates  - particularly those dealing with family violence, rape and assault, and make assessments and decisions. Assault is strongly related to youth gangs and requires action from many government agencies.

The next meeting was with heads of police from the Pareto municipalities. We would look at the state crime rate and then at their specific municipal crime rate. We would analyze the statistics and make decisions.  This group focused on property crimes and homicide.

The next meeting was with the regional coordinators of a community program named “Pasos” (Steps), which focuses on teaming up with the neighborhoods. We would look at the crime graphics and make decisions.  They were responsible for reaching the population at risk, the troublesome neighborhoods, the potential victims.   

We would also meet with municipal police departments and help them out with analyzing the graphs and making decisions. Police officers tend to think reactively. Now they began to think about prevention. They tend to think it’s their sole responsibility to fight crime. Now they looked at the system and began to team-up with society. They always complain about scarcity of resources. But we showed them the most valuable and free resource at hand: information.  Here’s an example: around 30% of car thefts are committed at malls’ parking lots; we published the information, the mall-managers took action, car thefts went down. 

Focus, measure and decide. That was the message. Do not disperse your energy. Measure only the relevant, do not get lost in the data. You can only make three types of decisions: Go-ahead, re-think or ask for more information. 

The media was fascinated with so much information. They reproduced the stats, published the preventive measures for each crime and then went on to interview some victims and some crime specialists. They had the public’s attention.

We had to reach everyone; we would start with population at risk and then move on to the rest. We asked for help from all. We worked with the whole system.

At first, the quality of the decisions at all levels was poor. It takes time to understand the annual cycle of rape and the rest of the violent crimes. It takes time to make full use of the statistical profiles. Police and other government officials would look at the graphs as if it were some football game, with them as spectators. Slowly, most stepped on the field. I was trying to be the coach on the sidelines and acted as if we were a loosing team, pressing to innovate and learn from experience. The “owners” of the team, Governor Bours and Figueroa, kept both a close look and their faith. Their leadership was fundamental to sustain the effort.

The great benefit of crime rates is that they move fast. Effectiveness of decisions can be verified on a weekly or monthly basis.  We wouldn’t lose time with excessive analysis; we would try the hypothesis and evaluate it next month. Focus, measure, and decide; again and again, ad infinitum. We used both crime rates and 066 (911) calls. We complemented information with surveys on rape, family violence, un-denounced crime and public perceptions. Every month more than 230 graphs appeared in the official website www.todosporlaseguridaddetodos.gob.mx

People could see what was happening at the local and state level.

Not all the mayors and heads of police understood, most resisted. We, or better yet- the system insisted. We had created a powerful model based on ethics and information. Our fulcrum was the information, our leverage, making it public.

At our meetings, it became evident who supported and who resisted, who was doing the job and who was goofing around.

And then, things started to move in the right direction. Crime rates started to fall.  Family violence was the first to show green numbers.  Family Violence and Rape can be decreased almost exclusively with information; crime profiles act like a mirror and thus, help potential victims take preventive measures.

We used these success stories to push on. Police departments from one city learned from experiences from another. Neighborhoods learned from each other. Newspapers learned from each other. We all learned from experimentation and experience. They all became very creative. It was time for me to step back and learn from them.

The system has gained strength and sophistication. Information is more precise and more relevant. Not all crimes have gone down, car-theft and homicides, both related to organized crime, are in the red; some cities are trying to catch up with the leaders; mafias and drug-lords are still operating. But the pressure is on. Criminals, corrupt officials and insensitive politicians have a harder time trying to hide. The evaluation tool has to move further down the process into the prosecution and judicial authorities.

I learn an important lesson: There are few exceptional politicians, the rest have to be pushed systematically by hard evidence to become exceptional. 

What has been proven in my opinion is that the system is working and can be extended to other states, other cities, other crimes and other social issues. In fact, the goal now is to make it a true social movement, property of the citizens.

It amazes me is that even though Sonora has become a nationwide success story or should I say, the only success story of radical crime reduction in Mexico in recent times, there has been no serious benchmarking from the national government or other state governments. President Calderon can easily replicate success on a national level if he can put ethics in front of politics and embrace the model. He could delegate the job of building and maintaining the crime-traffic-light to independent evaluators. The data is there, hidden within his Security Council, kept in the dark, waiting.

People in Mexico are out on the streets, manifesting their despair with increasing crime rates and corrupt police, and politicians trying to handle the pressure with the old paradigms. If there is no serious effort to build an evaluation tool like Sonora did, if power is not transferred to society, the recently signed National Agreement on Security will fail and President Calderon will face a serious political crisis.

I believe trying to control complex systems is like trying to control the weather. I believe chaos is related to force and order to power. I believe ethics reinforces life and becomes a high-energy attractor field. I believe the Universe likes truth and information.  Or maybe it’s just me trying to explain something I don’t fully understand and just knowing that it works.

Monterrey, Mexico                                                                                    August 2008