In 2006, the municipal president of Neza, a tough area of two million people on the eastern edge of Mexico City, decided that the members of his police force needed to become "better citizens." He decided that they should be given a reading list, on which could be found Don Quixote, Juan Rulfo's beautiful novella Pedro Paramo, Octavio Paz' essay on Mexican culture The Labyrinth of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,and works by Carlos Fuentes, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Agatha Christie and Edgar Allen Poe.
Neza's Chief of Police, Jorge Amador, believes that reading fiction will enrich his officers in at least three ways. First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary. Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. "A police officer must be worldy, and books enrich people's experience, indirectly." Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. "Risking your life to save other people's lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.
"Words on The Street" by Angel Gurria-Quintana, in Financial Times, March 3, 2006, as quoted in How Fiction Works.
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