According to Clara Brugada, Mayor of Mexico City, the police of that city are going to start wearing body cameras.
Mexico City already has plenty of video surveillance cameras, more in fact than any other city in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico City has about 83,000 such cameras, in contrast to 71,000 in New York.
But the new proposal is the use of body cameras for the police.
According to Proceso, on May 5th Mayor Brugada announced that “Very soon…we are going to present a program so that our police of Mexico City wear a camera attached to their uniform, with which we will begin this strategy or this program, with the traffic officers.”
That was on May 5th. Mayor Brugada did not say when this would begin or any other details, but she did say that the objective was that officers would be “transparent”, that it would “increase citizen confidence” and strengthen “the culture of legality. “
(Photo from a different date than her statement in this article)
Source: MVS Noticias
Traffic officers in Mexico are notorious for taking small bribes to allow people to get out of traffic fines. A bribe is called a “mordida”, literally a “bite”.
Wouldn’t body cameras, if utilized correctly, cramp the style of both the bribe-giver and the bribe-taker? Or will they find ways to get around it?
