Cancun, Q.R. — From the C5 Command Centre in Cancun, Governor Carlos Joaquín detailed security achievements during his six year term. He started by clarifying that the first order of business when he became governor was to reorganize the entire Public Security structure in the state.
He said that it the restructuring was necessary since it had been abandoned by previous governments and was necessary to regain the trust of the people. When he began his governorship, there were fewer than 150 security carmeras around the state, of which, he explained, less than half worked.
“It was a weak state with security forces focused on other activities. It was poorly equipped, people were poorly paid and poorly trained, and in many cases, mistreated. Between incompetence and complicity we found ourselves with security policies that were totally obsolete and failing,” explained Joaquín Wednesday.
He said that there were many problems which included incomplete or apocryphal reports sent to the federal secretariat or not sent at all. “Proof of this is that in the inventory received, there were less than 30 patrol cars for the entire state, 15 expired bulletproof vests and less than 150 cameras, less than half of which were working,” he shared during his Wednesday speech from the C5 in Cancun.
Improvements, he said, included nearly 100 percent of the Public Security workforce undergoing evaluations by the Control and Confidence Center. Of these, 83 percent of the state police officers and 49 percent of the state guard and custody officers are accredited with the Unique Police Certificate.
Now, after his six-year term, Joaquin reported having more than 2,200 video surveillance cameras installed and Neighborhood Watch Committees formed not to mention a state-of-the-art communications centre in Cancun.
“We have the instrumentation of the most modern Communication and Control Center of Mexico and Latin America, the C5 in Cancun, and with coordinatied efforts, we also invested in the construction of the Military Police Base, today the National Guard Base, with an amount of more than 700 million pesos,” he said.
Even with all that has been achieved, Joaquín recognized that there is much work to be done and stressed that it is vitally important to be careful about human rights, “careful about the law and of course very attentive to having and doing our job better to achieve a greater number of arrests, prevention schemes and above all to achieve peace and security”.
During the presentation, the Secretary of Public Security, Lucio Hernández Gutiérrez, said that there has been a significant reduction in high-impact crimes. From January to July 2022, homicides have decreased 9.8 percent, femicides decreased by 46.7 percent, extortion by 38.7 percent, kidnappings by 88.9 percent, small bike thefts by 21 percent and business robberies by 12.7 percent.
From October 2018 to date, 3,916 organized crime related arrests have been made along with the seizure of 1,202 firearms of different calibers and 1,493,319 doses of various narcotics.
