In Defiance of Reforms, Crime Rises in Mexico City

          By JULIA PRESTON

                MEXICO CITY -- At the beginning of this month, the Mexico City government turned over
                control of the police to civilian officials and announced a war on crime. Since then, the
          Mexico City police chief announced Monday with great annoyance, the violent-crime rate has
          soared 25 percent.

          The reason? The capital's gang chiefs are waging a war of their own to show who is in charge.

          "The people who control crime in this city sent out their flunkies to increase the crime rate in a brutal
          way, to signal that they are not willing to accept any systematic control over their activities," the chief,
          Alejandro Gertz Manero, said at a hastily summoned news conference where he spoke with the
          urgency of a field commander summoning the citizenry to arms.

          "Organized thugs and their likely accomplices inside our force have declared war on this society,"
          said Gertz, a former university rector who took over the police force two months ago. "I told every
          one of our commanders that the criminals' challenge is intolerable. We cannot put up with it one
          minute more."

          Gertz said he told the 54 city precinct commanders that he expects a clear decline in crime in coming
          weeks and will fire any one of them who fails to meet this goal.

          Mexico City residents are already so beleaguered by rampant muggings, break-ins and car thefts
          that they hardly noticed the sharp increase in these crimes last week. But police figures from Nov. 5
          to 11 showed that 2,962 violent crimes were reported in the city, up one-quarter from the week
          before. In one case, a woman was mugged and beaten at the main entrance to city police
          headquarters.

          This month, Gertz enacted reforms more radical than any tried before. He gave control of the police
          to civilian officials who head the city's 16 boroughs. For the first time, Gertz forced all officers to
          punch time clocks.

          He fired 16 chiefs in high-crime precincts and created local civilian review boards and citizen hot
          lines to monitor police conduct. He also imposed competitive bidding for all contracts to supply
          uniforms, motorcycles, helicopters and stoplights.

          City officials said they believe the combined program brought tight new monitoring of officers'
          movements and cut deeply into criminal bosses' ability to command local police squads.

          Also on Monday, Interior Minister Francisco Labastida announced the creation of a new
          10,000-troop national police force to take the place of the notorious "federales," the catch-all word
          in Spanish for the federal highway, immigration and customs police.

          Members of the old federal police will be subjected to drug and psychological tests as well as a
          criminal background check, and only those who pass will be admitted to the new force.

          Calling the current federal police "absolutely insufficient," Labastida said that 94 percent of all violent
          crimes reported in Mexico are never solved or prosecuted.