Narco Noir ― Mexico's Cartels, Cops, and Corruption

Crime and security expert Vanda Felbab-Brown conducted more than eight years of fieldwork across Mexico analyzing policy interventions in key crime and violence hotspots, as well as in control cases. The result isNarco Noir: Mexico's Cartels, Cops, and Corruption, an extensive and unique set of organized crime case studies that include principal cases like, Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, Monterrey, Michoacan, and Chiapas as well as in Mexico City.

Narco Noir provides detailed assessments of the various law enforcement strategies, socio-economic anti-crime policies, and civil society mobilization efforts in key violent hotspots. The cases cover a wide variety of crime patterns and dynamics as well as policy responses. Felbab-Brown also includes an extensive section of policy recommendations, providing a detailed analysis of how to improve law enforcement capacity and strategies, change interdiction patterns to achieve greater deterrence capacity, and restructure socio-economic anti-crime policies.

Dr. Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution and co-director of Brookings project on Improving Global Drug Policy, specializes in crime and security. She is the author of Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-building in Afghanistan and Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs.