Policemen without Degrees to be Let Go

(Chilpancingo, AN 6 May) The new State Secretary of Public Safety, Ramón Almonte Borja, announced that federal regulations require that all police officers at the state and local levels who do not have a college degree will be struck from the payroll at the end of this year.

For Guerrero, this jeopardizes well over half of all state and local police. According to Mr. Almonte, a significant number do not even know how to read and write, much less be able to obtain a college degree. The municipal police forces are most vulnerable in this respect, he said. There are over 3,200 beat patrolmen, auxiliary police and ecological police, and more than half failed to finish grade school or high school, says the public safety director. He speculated that the “ministerial police” (those who work as investigators of crimes for the prosecutors) probably are facing the same situation, but he said he had no direct knowledge of that part of the picture.