Ernesto López Portillo

Ernesto López Portillo is spearheading a citizen-based approach to police reform in Mexico. Through carefully designed interventions that position his organization, Insyde, as a partner rather than an antagonist to police agencies, he combines international best practices with empirical research to diagnose systemic challenges and produce solutions to make public security institutions more transparent and responsive to society.

Engaging his many years of experience working with public security issues in Mexico, Ernesto founded the Institute for Security and Democracy (Insyde), a citizen organization (CO) dedicated to the democratic reform of Mexico’s law enforcement agencies. Police agencies at all levels of government in Mexico—municipal, state, and federal—frequently struggle with institutional corruption, limited resources, bureaucratic inefficiency, and limited professional training, all of which make effective community oversight difficult.

Through Insyde’s work, Ernesto and his team are executing a citizen-based approach to police reform. He combines applied research and methodologies, derived from the best practices in police reform around the world, with comprehensive and objective evaluations of individual police institutions throughout the country. Insyde’s relationship with police institutions is deliberately collaborative rather than antagonistic, seeking to help the police transform their own organizations rather than foisting change on them from the outside. Ernesto firmly believes that the police themselves are the most qualified to identify internal problems and resolve them with support from Insyde’s technical experts. After Insyde completes its careful analysis of each agency, the CO accompanies police leaders during the implementation of reforms co-determined by Insyde and the police themselves. In addition, Insyde also trains other civil society groups, the media, and the business community to improve citizen surveillance of law enforcement agencies. Through these initiatives, Ernesto hopes to revolutionize Mexican society’s relationship with the police.

Ernesto has focused on creating successful test cases that can then serve as models for reform in other police institutions. Insyde has already worked with eight different municipal and state police institutions, and now the organization’s reputation is so strong that law enforcement agencies have started to seek out Insyde rather than vice versa. In the long-term Ernesto wants to transform Mexican police institutions at all levels into professional and transparent agencies that are responsive and dedicated to protecting the citizens they serve. Moreover, he aims to build Insyde’s model into a renowned standard for citizen-based police reform throughout Latin America.

As Mexico struggles daily with the widespread violence stemming from drug trafficking and organized crime, the sense of public security is at an all-time low. Questionable police performance, already a long-time challenge in Mexico, leaves Mexicans with low respect for law enforcement, and an absence of the rule of law has been detrimental to the development of a safe and democratic society. While public distrust of the police has increased in severity with the rise in violence over the last few years, the roots of that distrust lay in structural and cultural problems that have long plagued Mexico’s public security institutions. Corruption and lack of accountability feed each other in a vicious cycle, fueled by insufficient resources, lack of professional training, and lack of effective, transparent evaluation mechanisms. The system of incentives within public security institutions often rewards police officers for their loyalty to their supervisors rather than their protection of citizens, which further adds to the distrustful relationship between the public and the police.

The current structural problems facing Mexican police institutions originate in large part from their association with the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that governed the country unimpeded for 71 years during the 20th century. The party created an entire public security apparatus with a punitive legal system that protected the interests of the state and the economic and social elite, rather than those of the general public. At the same time, party officials sought to co-opt the actions of the police, subjugating them to their own political will. There is documented evidence that as an extension of the party, the police even committed human rights violations against marginalized groups such as indigenous peoples, migrants, and students. To consolidate its authority over Mexican society even more, the PRI effectively repressed the development of an active civil society, which is reflected in the weak present-day culture of citizen oversight of public institutions in Mexico. Even despite the watershed political opening that occurred following the 2000 election of President Vicente Fox from an opposition party, the legacy that the PRI regime has left can still be seen today in a weak police force and a civil society that has started to blossom only now.

Although the vast majority of Mexicans recognize the necessity and importance of reforming its police institutions, the reality of such reforms is extremely complex. Numerous political interests persist that create obstacles to any significant change in the structure and operations of the police. Public safety agencies themselves have a reputation of being closed institutions that exclude the involvement of external actors, particularly when those actors try to impose changes from the outside without fully understanding police culture. Low levels of transparency in most law enforcement agencies combined with a high level of bureaucratic inefficiency have made previous efforts to reform them exceedingly slow and complicated.

Insyde promotes the modernization of police institutions through effective and collaborative citizen oversight. This strategy uses applied research on police reform to develop and implement best practices of supervision, evaluation, planning, training, and communication in police institutions at all levels of government. Foremost in all of Insyde’s work are the principles of transparency and accountability to the citizenry, as Ernesto seeks to transform not only the policies and actions of the police but also the attitudes and roles of civil society actors with regard to the police. With support from a diverse portfolio of international funders, including the Open Society Institute, the MacArthur and Ford Foundations, the U.S. Mérida Initiative, and numerous European governments, Ernesto has established a respected Mexican CO that has earned the confidence of both the Mexican public and police institutions.

At the core of his model, Ernesto applies theoretical and empirical research to police forces’ protocols and actions through direct interventions in partnership with the police. Unlike a traditional think tank, Insyde completes investigations on innovation in security reform with the explicit end of using those results to achieve tangible change in the Mexican public security system. Although Ernesto and his staff of twenty-six members do publish reports of their conclusions, they are not academics, but rather technical experts in reforming such a complex sector as public security in Mexico. In fact, Ernesto believes that research is essential to achieving systemic change in this area because it enables the design of relevant new techniques in how to improve police performance with respect to the public’s needs. Ernesto understands that without knowledge or expertise in this field, Insyde would never gain either legitimacy or influence in police operations. In addition to more traditional research methods, Insyde also employs more creative means to identify best practices in public security, such as launching open source Internet-based competitions throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in line with the a free-flowing exchange of ideas.

Initially Ernesto had to solicit the collaboration of police institutions to implement new evaluation and accountability measures, but today Insyde has built such a strong reputation in the field that police institution agencies now proactively seek Insyde’s expertise. For Ernesto, it is extremely important that the police perceive Insyde as a partner in this process of reform, rather than an adversary. In this sense, Ernesto says that Insyde serves as a “mirror” in which the police themselves can identify and understand the problems within their own organization and devise potential solutions. This distinguishes Insyde from other “watchdog” groups that report on public institutions’ activities without necessarily proposing solutions in conjunction with the institutions. With the information that the team obtains in the diagnostic phase, Insyde helps police officials produce specific recommendations for changes in agency structure and behavior, ranging from officer protocol to case documentation. If the police agencies request Insyde’s assistance in the implementation of these changes, Ernesto and his team accompany them in a process of structural transformation. Ultimately, however, the decision to implement the recommendations always belongs to the police institution.

To date, Insyde has worked directly with eight police institutions on the municipal and state levels in Mexico, in some cases undertaking projects that last for many months. Some examples of Insyde’s interventions with these institutions include training the members of the police force of Nezahualcóyotl, a sprawling and impoverished city that neighbors Mexico City, in practices that promote transparency; applying the professional police standards designed by the Center for Professional Certification of Police Agencies (CERTIPOL, a division of Insyde) to the State Preventive Police of Nuevo León, a state that has suffered a high level of violence in recent years; and implementing all fifty-eight of the recommendations devised after a detailed diagnostic of the bureau of investigation of the Mexico City Office of the General Prosecutor, an unprecedented achievement in Mexico.

At the same time, Ernesto and his team offer training to other actors—COs, media organizations, and private businesses—to build up and reinforce the entire ecosystem supporting democratic police accountability. The basic concept is to form citizen monitors and independent auditors within both the private and citizen sectors to aid the police agencies in their attempts to become more open and responsive to the Mexican citizenry. Insyde has also crafted a comprehensive communications strategy with the mass media—primarily radio and print—and with a more academic audience through the publication of reports. By disseminating information about its work to the Mexican population at-large, particularly through the media, Insyde aims to foster the broad cultural change needed to buttress institutional police reform.

In the short to medium term, Ernesto is measuring his impact in terms of the number and the nature of changes observed in the police agencies with which Insyde has worked. He is further interested in tracing the circulation and integration of the concept of police responsibility in the activities of other external actors such as other COs, the media, and politicians. However, Ernesto understands that cultural shifts within both public security institutions and the Mexican public require years to evolve and take hold. For this reason, he considers the current results of Insyde’s work to be an indication of a much deeper and substantive, yet protracted, transformation taking place across the country. In the long-term, his goals are to help implement transformative reform in at least twenty law enforcement institutions at all levels of Mexican government, to trigger a cultural paradigm shift in police attitudes and behavior, and to bolster citizen oversight of public security institutions and initiatives. Ernesto also wants to position Insyde as an exemplar among COs in Latin America and the Caribbean that can launch parallel movements to reform police institutions throughout the region.

Growing up in a family of political activists, from an early age Ernesto learned the values of solidarity and respect from his parents. While participating with his parents in marches to demand better conditions and rights for poor farmers in Mexico, he began to develop his own consciousness of social justice and the fundamental dignity of all human beings. He was drawn to the writings of Latin American revolutionaries, and as a young man he came to value the social struggle for free expression, independent thought, and critical thinking. According to Ernesto, from when he was quite young he has always believed that “the only legitimate authority is that which works to improve the quality of life for all.”

Ernesto enrolled in the undergraduate law program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he became fascinated with issues of organized crime and the Italian mafia in one of his courses. Under his professor’s guidance, Ernesto grew increasingly interested in public security, and in 1989 he transferred to the National Institute of Criminal Science. There he studied topics like justice, human rights, and the relationship between law enforcement and the community, all of which still guide his work today. During his studies, he was also exposed to the idea of democratic reform of the justice system. In his comparative studies of security institutions in Mexico and other nations, Ernesto began to question why his country did not have a strong and responsible criminal justice system like that of many countries in Europe. After years of independent research into the public security structures of the U.S., Europe, and South America, Ernesto concluded that it was indeed possible to construct a relationship of collaboration and mutual respect between the police and the citizenry. It was then that he decided to dedicate himself to driving that systemic cultural transformation in his native Mexico.

After several years working at the National Institute where he had studied, Ernesto served as an advisor to the Federal Attorney General, both houses of the Mexican Congress, and the Mexico City Legislature on issues of police reform and accountability. In 1997 he left the public sphere to direct his own initiatives, and in 2003 he founded Insyde. Ernesto is the author of Public Security in Mexico, a groundbreaking publication in Mexico, and several other books and articles on related issues. In addition to serving as Executive Director of Insyde and designing and executing the organization’s agenda, Ernesto writes regularly for El Universal, a Mexican newspaper with national circulation, about violence and police reform in an effort to spread his ideas more broadly among Mexican society. He also serves as an advisor to the Mexico City Human Rights Commission. As a recognized national and regional leader in police reform and accountability, Ernesto is catalyzing a cultural and political transformation to find solutions to one of the most urgent structural problems facing Mexico today.