ThenDoBetter Grant winner: David Blanc
I’ve awarded a ThenDoBetter Grant to David Blanc to help writing a book of chronicles from Mexian police officers (see below for an outline of the project). His twitter is here and he writes a regular newspaper column and his web page is here (mainly Spanish)
Book of chronicles from Mexican police officers
It still remains unclear the motivations that leads people to become a police officer in Mexico. On average, they have a monthly salary of 540 dollars. They also have to pay essential material for their duty such as boots, uniforms, bullets and even gas for the patrol. Some have never received training on how to use a weapon or driving a car. All of the above, added to the fact that every day 1.5 officers are killed in the country, and that they usually don´t have a life insurance. Despite this dramatic reality, thousands of police officers risk their lives and work under precarious conditions to protect citizens and provide in a certain way security. Certainly, there should be something praiseworthy.
Behind these statistics there are a lot of stories untold. Everyone tends to forget that police officers are humans too and they are actually the most affected. Therefore, I want to write a book of chronicles to visualize how being a Mexican police officer is one of the most dangerous, underpaid, intrinsically corrupt, and discriminatory profession, and raise awareness of how they manage to address major security problems with scarce resources and training. This project aims to change the citizen bad perspective of police officers and try to empathize in order to start reestablishing communication between both.
The book does not have the objective to justify police abuses nor say all police corporations are good. There are bad police officers. There are bad corporations. Any abuse should be investigated and punished. The book will focus on giving a different perspective and a new narrative on police perception, by outlining some experiences they face during duty.