Screams in the supermarket led the night shift guards to Officer Elizabeth Castañeda. When they found her on the floor, clutching her neck to stop the bleeding, they knew they were in a race against time: there were already pools of blood around the officer, and the ambulance had to navigate the heavy traffic of November 25th on San Jerónimo Avenue in the Álvaro Obregón borough if it wanted to save her from fatal hypovolemic shock.
The officer hadn’t been injured by a robber. Nor by a violent customer. The man who slashed her neck with a box cutter was another officer: her boss, Óscar Bastida, who, after the attempted murder, fled the supermarket where he was assigned as a security guard. A few minutes later, Bastida was apprehended by another officer, who noticed a uniformed colleague running erratically with blood on his wrists and neck: the assailant was attempting suicide.
Thanks to the quick action of the guards and paramedics, Elizabeth Castañeda survived the attack and avoided becoming part of a growing statistic: police officers killed by other officers. The tragedy of dying at the hands of a colleague.
Public security consultant Daniel Gómez Tagle measured this unusual phenomenon in his report, “Police Mortality in Mexico: A Look at the National Public Security Strategy of the previous six-year term, through the deaths of 2,874 police officers.
The data shows that, on average, one officer dies every six weeks due to the actions of another. In total, 47 police killings by assailants with badges and uniforms occurred during the López Obrador administration. The enemy travels in a patrol car.
Why are police officers killing each other? “It’s very difficult to find an organic link between these homicides. In my analysis, 30 percent result from internal conflicts among police officers. Seventeen percent are off-duty incidents. And when the murders occur while on duty, it’s documented that alcohol or methamphetamine use is involved. Thirteen percent are classified as accidental deaths, although there are three cases where it’s said there was a case of mistaken identity… but the officer is shot in the head.
“There are other cases of disputes over debts. Other cases involve workplace sanctions; that is, the officer is punished and, in revenge, kills a colleague. Therefore, the employer isn’t as important in this type of police killing as the context of police work,” says Gómez Tagle, who directs the Azul Cobalto project, which analyzes violence against police officers in Mexico. “From a comprehensive analysis, the main motive is working conditions.”
