In October 2009, Ross and Cohen jointly led a techdel to Mexico City. The idea was to generate novel solutions for countering narcotics crime, an enormous internal problem for Mexico but also an expensive and politically explosive border issue for the U.S. (The U.S. will spend more than $3.5 billion on drug interdiction this year, much of it in Mexico.) In 2009, Ciudad Juárez alone had 2,600 homicides; given the frequent collusion between gangs and the police, witnesses to crimes fear coming forward, which contributes to a kind of narcostate just the other side of the U.S. border. “The lack of trust in the police is a big part of the problem,” Ross says. “The whole concept of anonymous crime reporting has been lost.”
The techdel’s highlight was a meeting with Carlos Slim, the telecom giant and currently the richest man in the world (as well as a major stockholder and creditor of The New York Times). Pascual later told me that in the meeting, James Eberhard of Mobile Accord pointed out that even in the lowest-income neighborhoods of Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Mexico City, people have cellphones and use S.M.S. all the time. Why not have a free short code for text messages so that anyone could report a crime? All personally identifiable data would be stripped from the S.M.S. before it entered a centralized database. From the database, the information would be fed into federal and municipal police systems, then could be monitored by a third-party NGO and mapped on the Internet publicly — in essence bringing anonymity and transparency to crime reporting. Just as important, the actions taken (or not taken) by municipal police forces would also be publicly traceable and monitored.
“I think there was a personal reaction on the part of Slim,” Pascual says. “He’s fascinated by these 30-year-old entrepreneurs that are two generations behind him.”
According to Ross: “He went around the room and asked us all of our ages. He started nodding, and he goes, ‘This is wonderful.’ And he pushes this button and calls in his sons.”
The meeting was scheduled for 40 minutes but lasted two hours. Slim offered, on the spot, to sponsor the free nationwide short code.
The program, which is to be implemented this fall, has some easily recognizable challenges. How do you weed out false reports? How do you gain trust in the anonymity of reporting? Recently, Mexico attempted to register all cellphone users in order to counter telephone extortion rackets, but the personal data, which was to be held confidentially, was soon available for purchase at a Mexico City flea market. “If you get people using these cellphones and reporting crimes and it results in retribution toward somebody because the data really isn’t stripped away, then people will never touch it,” Pascual says. “We’ve got to work with our Mexican counterparts and NGOs, the government and outside of government, so that this is something that they adopt and they want and they sustain.”
