r/nextfuckinglevel • u/bendubberley_ • 1d ago

A police officer in Mexico prevents someone's suicide attempt, on a bridge, with no safety equipment.

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u/Callmemabryartistry 1d ago

Nice to see police doing good.

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u/Goldglove528 1d ago

Most police do good. You only hear about the bad ones because they get more views.

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u/WeAreTotallyFucked 1d ago

Definitely not the case in Mexico..

Lived in Tijuana 5 years and I was WAY more afraid of the police than the cartel or any local gangs.

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u/icerom 1d ago

That's what's frustrating about Mexican news is Reddit. The reactions are always like the thing were happening in the US. When the whole Supreme Court got fired people celebrated as if the US SC had been fired, as if it weren't a completely different situation with terrible consequences for Mexican democracy.

As for the subject at hand, it depends on the part of the country. The Mexico City police is pretty hands off most of the time, as far as extorting or robbing regular citizens, but they're hardly helpful, either. The impunity rates are close to 100% and they don't help old ladies with their cats, either.

Making out the police as worse than the cartels, though... bold statement. It's not the police that is murdering over 100,000 per presidential term, let's leave it at that.

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u/WeAreTotallyFucked 1d ago edited 1d ago

I should have put a qualifier of sorts when I made that comment..

I was more afraid of the police because they were much more likely to just completely fuck me over for no reason other than being American.

The Cartel, on the other hand, didn't fuck with Americans unless you gave them a reason to.

So, admittedly, that's clearly a position that isn't shared between Mexican citizens and American citizens alike. On a general level, of course, the cartel is objectively much more dangerous. But I found that becoming fluent in Spanish plus always doing business in good faith earned a level of respect with the cartel that I could never have achieved with the police, no matter what I did to try to foster a relationship.

At one point, I was basically given a free pass amongst all the local police, ONLY because the local gang that ran the local cartel 'operations' had basically told them "Yeah, you're not allowed to fuck with this gringo anymore."

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u/icerom 1d ago

That's very interesting. Yes, I suppose it makes sense that your nationality would be to your advantage with one group and to your disadvantage with another. The only person I know who's been mugged by the police over here in many years is European.