Bad PR for PR

The New York Times has an editorial about the police problem in Puerto Rico:

The Justice Department has issued a devastating report on the rampant corruption and constitutional violations committed by the Puerto Rico Police Department, the second-largest police force in the United States. It concluded that “lasting reform will require nothing less than federal judicial intervention”. And the sooner, the better.
The department’s Civil Rights Division began investigating in 2008 under a federal law that permits the United States attorney general to initiate civil actions against state and local governments. The investigation found that the Police Department, with seventeen thousand officers, was “broken”, lacking basic systems of accountability at every level. The result was a “staggering level of crime and corruption” and a longstanding pattern of “violating the Constitution by using force, including deadly force, when no force or lesser force was called for”, as well as the routine use of illegal searches and seizures.
The investigation also found that officers were an appalling part of the crime problem. In recent years, there have been almost two thousand arrests of officers for murder, drug trafficking and other crimes, and almost fifteen hundred complaints of domestic violence against officers.
The federal government has the power to compel Puerto Rico to overhaul its Police Department through the force of a lawsuit or the less confrontational means of a consent decree with the Justice Department about what the police must do. Either way, the police agency will have to be monitored for compliance by a federal judge.
The report makes 133 reform recommendations. They include replacing politically appointed leaders with law-enforcement professionals; developing and adhering to high standards for hiring, promotion and firing; training, testing and retraining supervisors and officers; and making the police answerable to the community.
Such sweeping restructuring will take time. A similar federal investigation into brutality and corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department conducted after the Rodney King case resulted in eight years of federal court oversight before that police agency made sufficient progress to end the monitoring.
The Puerto Rico department is twice as large, and its problems are more pervasive. There is an urgent need to get the effort moving. Puerto Rico’s murder rate in 2009 was twice that of Louisiana, the state with the highest murder rate, and is on track this year to reach a record number. If Puerto Rico is to restore order with law, it is essential for the police force to demonstrate that it can do its job without breaking the law.

Rico says they've got just two hundred days to get their act together before he and his family and friends descend on the place for his birthday party...