Mexico's war on drugs has brought intense international attention to that country, and Police Reform in Mexico directs that attention toward a realistic assessment of the reforms, laws, and mechanisms used to fight it. Through that focus, it shows how Mexico embodies both the potential and the obstacles facing Latin America's long-standing struggle against crime, highlighting “two separate realities: the reality of police corruption, ineffectiveness, and abuse alongside an additional reality of measurable improvement in police professionalism” (10). Comprising these coexisting realms are many contradictory practices and entrenched weaknesses: poor local-national coordination; honest officials in corrupt agencies; infiltration of organized crime, a barely functioning judiciary, and a society demanding security but unwilling to report crime (78 percent of Mexico's crimes in 2008 went unreported). The inability to implement policies to overcome these dilemmas is both institutional and political, Sabet argues, rooted in patronage amid continual change of policymakers. To explain why, the book examines the range of reforms, from recruitment and salaries to administration and accountability, and the range of actors, from the President down to entry-level police officers, who shape reform's content as well as its fate.

Among those actors and arenas, and unlike most studies of police reform, Sabet zeroes in on the level where it counts most: the municipalities, which employ the great majority of Mexican police. The book examines four cities that have faced serious threats from organized crime but with very different responses and results: Chihuahua City, Hermosillo, Mexicali, and Tijuana. At one end of the spectrum is the substantial progress in Chihuahua, and at the other are reform's frequent collapses in Tijuana. On an issue where a lack of leadership is a facile culprit for failure, he instead blames “too much leadership” (65)—specifically, “an overly strong municipal presence with enormous discretion, a weak city council system that privileges the informal rules over the formal rules and fails to insulate public administration from partisanship and patronage, and constant turnover in personnel and policy” (69). The median tenure of Mexico's local security directors is a mere two years (75)—too little time to implement their policies, which in any case are usually discarded after the next election. The case study and other cities, as a result, are littered with wasteful and short-lived programs, from special squads in Mexicali to Tijuana's debt-heavy equipment expenditures.

But some of these programs were well conceived, particularly those centered on community policing, which helps break “a status quo of police ineffectiveness, abuse, and corruption, on the one hand, and citizen noncompliance, failure of coproduction, and low support on the other” (141). As in any country, crimes are solved with evidence and witnesses, which are difficult to acquire without citizen cooperation. By giving citizens more control over security policy, in fact, some of Latin America's most violent municipalities—such as in San Salvador, San Pedro Sula in Honduras, Bolivia's El Alto, and Venezuela's Maracaibo—have begun to curb crippling crime rates through citizen-based change. But only with political continuity are such changes likely to last, as seen in countries like Colombia and, in Mexico, in cities like Chihuahua. In its case-study cities, the book also examines municipal public-security committees, another promising form of citizen monitoring. While most committees floundered, Baja California's was successful precisely because it had consistent backing by the administration and civil society to carry out key powers, such as to conduct evaluations.

The book zeroes in on the weak links in security reform, such as evaluation and accountability, citing the dearth of mechanisms to objectively assess reform and to reveal, much less prevent or punish, the corruption pervading most police agencies. Another important focus that receives inadequate attention in other studies is recruitment. While it reports alarming studies showing that most Mexican police are of below average IQ, and 64 percent have signs of being sociopaths, the book also brings out efforts to overcome such weaknesses, such as in Chihuahua, which not only made high school a requirement for cadets, but also offered serving officers “opportunities to earn high school, college, and even master's degrees” (48–49).

The analysis culminates in a chapter on organized crime, rightly stressed as the breaking point for reform. As Sabet points out, officials can collude with, confront, or tolerate organized crime. The second option requires “sufficient counterincentives to organized crime's threats and bribery” (97), which, along with the ability to uncover corruption's complex networks, are inadequate. And even success at evading one organized crime syndicate means a greater likelihood of being targeted by another, as he shows in the case of Tijuana.

Mexico, like other countries, has responded to perennial local weakness with a national overhaul, centered on a highly trained Federal Police. The book does not sufficiently cover the New Police Model—the foundation for all national reform that promotes a cycle of intelligence in which information is accurate and applied. But it does describe obstacles, like weak coordination and restricted access, that imperil the other principal elements of this reform, including recruitment, career development, and the central database known as Plataforma México.

Another dimension missed in the book is the private security sector, a major source of illegal trade and activity. According to the national Council of Private Security (CNSP), gaps between local, state, and federal laws leave about 80 percent of private firms essentially unregulated. The large informal sector of security, which overlaps with state agencies throughout Latin America, aggravates many of the problems that Sabet examines. Unregulated police helpers called madrinas are responsible for rights abuses such as forced confessions, for example, while many vigilante groups that cooperate with the police also provide money laundering fronts for traffickers of people, species, timber, and drugs.

Although Mexico is mired in one of Latin America's biggest battles against crime, this book shows what a critical case it is for comparative analysis. Like many Latin American policy scholars, such as Barbara Geddes and Robert Kaufman, Sabet demonstrates the struggle that ad hoc and interrupted reforms face against well-organized, politically connected opponents. Perú, Venezuela, Argentina's Buenos Aires province, Brazil's Rio de Janeiro state, and many other parts of Latin America have suffered sudden reversals of comprehensive and concerted security reforms. The significant headway that Mexico has made, though, indicates how other countries can and should address problems such as youth violence, a flood of firearms, and organized-crime infiltration with their limited resources and decentralized thicket of state and municipal police. The book's detailed description of Mexico's steady progress, even in the midst of a war that has killed tens of thousands of people, shows that even the strongest of barriers does not consign reform to failure.