Policia Estatal Acreditable

I just noticed the "Acreditable" sign on Policia Estatal pick-ups.
Google translates that to the English "creditable", which can mean "commendable, praiseworthy, laudable, admirable, honourable, meritorious, worthy, deserving, respectable....etc.....attributes we'd all like to see in our police forces.
I suspect, however, that a more literal translation is the right one: the Spanish "acreditable" in this sense probably means the same as the English "accredited": to certify as meeting prescribed standards or requirements. In other words, "We passed all the tests."
Either way, it's an odd word to stick on a police vehicle. Could it be a measure of just how untrustworthy police had become?

Perhaps you've missed my numerous posts on this subject. Since the time of Vicente Fox (14 years ago) the federal government has been working on putting together a trustworthy, professionally trained police force that must first undergo not just education and rigorous training but personal background checks and confidence testing. While the federal government formed new federal police forces, they also required state and municipal governments to allow their police forces to be screened by the federal government in order for the state and municipal governments to receive federal money to fund their state and municipal police forces. You'd be surprised how many state and federal governments balked at the idea of having their personal "enforcers" vetted. But eventually the state government of Guerrero signed on, albeit too late to avoid the tragedy in Iguala, where the state had dragged its feet implementing the new requirements at the behest of the criminal municipal government there. The problem is, the entire state is infested with similar criminal-controlled governments, and Zihuatanejo is no exception. Our mayor is under investigation for what locals consider common knowledge.

Hopefully this program of professionalizing the police forces will bear fruit. This is what the Mando Único and the abolition of most municipal police forces hopes to achieve. The problem is that we have many wonderful laws that simply aren't applied, often because of insufficient budgets to the agencies entrusted with enforcement of laws. For example the local federal office entrusted with regulating the fishing industry has something like 3 or 5 personnel to cover the entire coast from here to Acapulco. This is what I call bureaucratic impossibility: when a bureaucracy is designed to fail or to be woefully inefficient or inadequate.

Also, there are no police better prepared to police a community than local police who know the area. These out-of-town police haven't a clue what's going on here, and it takes them quite a while to have to learn the local ropes, but by the time they do they will probably be rotated to other locations, because rotating them is one of the methods being used to prevent corruption by the organized criminals who will endeavor to identify them and threaten them (usually by threatening a family member) in order to get them to cooperate.

But as I repeat, and as every educated person in Latin America knows, the elephant in the room remains the U.S. government and its "War On Drugs" that has coerced most of the world into following its policy while now they are beginning to at least legalize pot at home. EVERYTHING needs to be decriminalized and regulated, especially cocaine, heroin and meth, the big money makers for the narcos that allow organized criminals throughout the region to have more money, technology and arms at their disposal than the entire governments. Until then, nothing will change. People will keep dying, and societies will continue paying the price for the U.S. government's intransigence on yet another of their long-failed policies.

But in the meantime our government is doing what it can, though with recent events here and in Michoacán it is quite obvious we still have a long and hard row to hoe.