Taking Aim at the Tijuana Drug Cartels

Amid questions about police collusion with drug traffickers in the Mexican border town of Tijuana, President Felipe Calderon last month sent 3,300 soldiers and federal police there to ferret out the drug gangs and their abettors. As part of that charge, the federal troops went through each police station in the city and seized all the officers’ guns in order to have them checked out – apparently for telltale clues that would link Tijuana police and their guns to the local drug smugglers.

Yet, as of late last month, reports the Associated Press, the federales still hadn’t gotten around to returning the guns to police, leaving Tijuana officers to patrol unarmed.

Any possible police-cartel connection aside, Tijuana isn’t exactly the kind of place you’d want to be on patrol without a weapon – 300 people were murdered there in 2006, including 13 officers – which is why the Tijuana PD has taken matters into their own hands, arming officers that patrol tourist areas of the city with slingshots and bags of ballbearings, said municipal police spokesman Fernando Bojorquez.

Not surprisingly, the new slingshot arms plan hasn’t exactly gone over well with the rank-and-file who say leaving them unarmed isn’t safe – for sure, it seem like taking guns away from only those officers suspected of corruption, and leaving the rest of the force armed with something other than a freakin’ rubber band, might’ve been a better way to go. “The arms are our tools for work,” Officer Juan Manuel Nieves said during a demonstration last month outside the Tijuana town hall. “Do they want more police to be killed?”