State Police for Hire: Examining Mexico’s Auxiliary and Banking Police Forces

• In Event: The Politics of Policing and Local Security Provision in the Global South

Abstract

Latin America’s emergence as the “murder capital of the world” has stimulated a surge in research on policing and non-state security providers in the region. Much of this research either focuses on the duality of policing between public and private entities, or emphasizes the informal plurality of varying types of state, non-state, and hybrid security providers. Nevertheless, while scholars have started to investigate the intersection between the public and private, whether top-down state regulation of the private security industry or bottom-up state capture by criminal actors, few have examined instances in which the state is directly participating in the market for security. In Mexico, a number of state police forces include units (often referred to as the auxiliary or banking police) dedicated to obtaining protection contracts from public and private clients. The existence of these forces leads to the following question: Why would the state offer private protection when its role is to provide security as a public good? I argue that Mexican states use these units to bolster their government coffers by providing them with special powers and built-in advantages that make it easier to outcompete traditional private security firms. The presence of Mexico’s auxiliary and banking police forces challenges our conceptions about the relationship between the state and the private security sector and raises questions about a democratic state’s responsibility towards its citizens in regard to security provision.

Author

• Logan Puck, Bates College