Los Cabos, BCS. _ Citizens have the obligation to be demanding and question the authorities, because that is the way to raise the level of government, he said. Miguel Treviño de Hoyosformer Mayor of San Pedro Garza Garcia.
The now Director of the School of Government and Public Transformation of the Tecnológico de Monterrey gave a lecture on the conference Strengthening citizen security at the municipal levelin the Summit 2024 Cities with a Future. No fear of actionwhich organizes Sea of Cortez ForumIn his speech, he explained what they have been doing in his municipality for 6 years to improve the security and coexistence conditions of its citizens.
"To govern a municipality with demanding citizens, who always raise the bar, who observe what you do well and what you do wrong, that once you achieve something that is important to you, the next day they are already raising the bar... it is the best blessing for a governor," he said.
For this reason, the attendees of the fourth summit of Sea of Cortez Forum suggested that they assume the responsibility of being demanding with their rulers.
"When we do it with substance, supported by dialogue meetings like this one, we are making a very important contribution to our country, helping to raise all public management and the level of government," he said.
The case of San Pedro Garza García
In presenting the case of San Pedro Garza GarciaTreviño de Hoyos acknowledged that it is a municipality with very particular characteristics that facilitate security conditions, since it is small with only 130,000 inhabitants, with few accesses and with resources that most of the municipalities in the country do not have, and above all with a very participative and demanding citizenry.
He emphasized that in the two terms of his administration, they worked in three areas to achieve the improvements in security and citizen coexistence that made San Pedro Garza Garcia lead 19 out of 24 INEGI surveys as the safest municipality in Mexico.
These three areas are training, operation y occupation of public spaces.
On police professionalization
In the case of police training, he explained that it was divided into recruitment, initial training and continuous training of officers.
"Belonging to the San Pedro Police became so aspirational that today it is a corporation that is receiving all the time, generation after generation, talented boys and girls from all over the country," he said.
In his municipality, he established as a requirement to have a professional degree to aspire to become a police officer, extended the initial training process from 6 to 9 months and once integrated into the corporation, to continue with continuous training. Salary conditions were improved and in San Pedro Garza García, the policeman who earns the least is 24 thousand pesos free.
Intelligence: Data-driven operation
Regarding the operation, he stressed that the security model was based on a fact- and data-driven approach to decision making.
"For us, that approach was fundamental. It is an emphasis that I do not see in my fellow mayors and it is very powerful. This is what allowed us to manage the municipality with a very detailed sensitivity to what was happening," he said.
He added that a major purge was carried out to have reliable police officers, which reduced the number of agents to 350, but at the end of his administration, with the entry of new recruits, the force was increased to 650.
"The important thing about this number of police officers for a relatively small municipality is that we were able to reduce the distribution of quadrants in the municipal territory and that shortened the transfer times of a police officer to respond to emergencies. In San Pedro it takes us 3 minutes to get to an emergency call", he indicated.
Recovery of public spaces
The third axis was to occupy public space, which was achieved with the rescue of parks in the first three years and with urban regeneration projects, such as the Historic Center, in the second period.
"The value of security is to feel calm to be outside and in this public space, not only to be in conditions that are truly attractive, but also to have activations that make you want to be there sharing with other people," he said.
The former Mayor of San Pedro Garza García considered that a good city is one that encourages the good encounter of strangers in public spaces.
He stressed that this municipality can serve as a laboratory to establish causes and effects and in this sense what they did to reduce security rates can serve to learn some lessons that can be applied in other regions of the country.
