English

Mexico among top 10 least safe countries

According to Gallup’s 2019 Global Law and Order report, Mexico is the ninth nation in the world with the worst law and order index

Insecurity and lack of trust in Mexican police officers are a burden for the country - Photo: Ivan Stephens/EL UNIVERSAL
09/11/2019 |09:30
Redacción El Universal
Pendiente este autorVer perfil

Insecurity

and lack of trust in Mexican police officers are a burden for the country. According to , Mexico is the ninth nation in the world with the worst law and order index, according to the surveyed fellow nationals.

This classification places Mexico among the 10 least safe countries in the world , tied with Uganda , Botswana , and Namibia , and only better than Chad , South Africa, Liberia , Gabon , Venezuela , and Afganistan .

Newsletter
Recibe en tu correo las noticias más destacadas para viajar, trabajar y vivir en EU

Mexico, placed 134 out of 142 assessed countries, has barely improved compared to last year when it was in the seventh-worst place.

Have you heard

is Mexico's worst tragedy?

However, it is light years away from previous classifications: in the 2017 report , Mexico was on place 23 with a higher score than the last two years.

Gallup’s Global Law and Order report

is a score that shows the population’s trust and feeling of security ; the higher the score (out of 100), which is calculated by adding the “positive” answers to the questions asked, the higher the security feeling.

Mexico got 60 points in the report published on November 7 .

The index is measured with four questions : Do you trust local police?; Do you feel safe walking in your city by night?; Has anyone stolen money or belongings from you or a relative in the last year?; Have you been robbed in the last 12 months? The survey was answered by 1,000 Mexicans during October 2018 .

EL UNIVERSAL

requested the answers and concrete information of Mexicans about these questions, but did not deliver this information before the time of this writing.

Mexico’s situation and the feeling of danger and insecurity match with the rest of the Latin American continent. For instance, only 44% of those surveyed in Latin America and the Caribbean said they trusted local police officers, far away from the global 68% and even farther from Western Europe’s 84% and South Asia’s 83% .

“The relatively downward average of this measure in Latin America and the Caribbean is not surprising given the poor performance of all the metrics of the 2018 Law and Order Index , as well as in previous years. Five out of 10 countries with the lowest scores regarding the police question are located in this region,” said the report.

Did you know Mexico ranked

?

Global contrast

In contrast to the feeling in the region, the global population feels “safe” with an average score of 81/100 , just as the previous year.

Over two-thirds

of the surveyed on a global scale said they feel safe to walk at night in their country and that they trust security authorities. Only 13% said they had been stolen from in the last year; 6% said they had been victims of robbery. Figures remained the same as reported in 2018 .

Irremovability of the metrics is a constant and poses a concrete analysis: Gallup concludes that with figures that “have not changed much,” sustaining the United Nations ’ complaint that the world has not made substantial progress “to end , promote state of law, strengthen institutions at all levels or increase access to justice .”

Not only has it not improved in that respect, but in others, such as the case of Afganistan – with a 38/100 score – the situation has worsened, which has allowed Venezuela to abandon the title of the country with the worst index in the world (it is now the second worst).

Singapur

is on the other side of the coin, leading once again the classification with best Law and Order Index, with an almost perfect score of 97/100 , followed by Tajikistan (94), United Arab Emirates (93), Norway (93), and Turkmenistan (92).

The global scale study, published on November 7, 2019 , collects the impressions of nearly 152,000 persons from 142 countries .

Have you heard

has put Mexico in a violence blacklist?

mp