Crimes without punishment
September 22nd, 2003
Crime has become one of the most pressing concerns of Filipinos, as every survey on any issue that has to do with governance and the country’s problems has found. It is a concern that cuts across social classes. It is not limited to, or may not even be specially concerned with, worries over terrorist attacks like the bombings the country has experienced since 2000.
Middle-class Filipinos fear that they will be held up while walking home from the MRT on their way home in the evening. The affluent worry that their children will be kidnapped while on their way to school in the family Toyota. The poor guard their meager and hard earned salaries with a vigilance approaching paranoia during pay days, and sometimes end up paying for their resistance to jeepney and bus hold-uppers with their lives.
But whether poor, middle-class or affluent, among Filipinos the worst fear of all is that of the intruder who will hog-tie family members, perhaps rape one of them, and then kill everyone before making off with whatever cash and valuables they can find. Terrorist acts like the bombing of an LRT train in 2000, and that of a bus in 2002, they regard as too rare to be of any real concern. It’s the kidnappings, the thefts and the killings they fear.
Television and radio news thrive on these fears, boosting their ratings by reporting every robbery or shooting the police blotters have recorded. Filipinos watch and listen with morbid fascination, perhaps believing that by confronting their fears these will never become reality.
But out there on the streets and in broad daylight, their fears are real enough for them to take a dim view of the police. In their minds the police have not been of much help preventing crime. On the contrary. The public perceives the police not only as inefficient and unable to do much about apprehending crime suspects, much less in preventing crimes. What’s worse is that they are often perceived as part of the problem: as protectors of criminals, if not themselves directly involved in the crimes, sometimes even as ringleaders.
For some reason the police regard the public’s skepticism about both their capacity to do their job as well as the belief that many of their elements are themselves involved in crime as simply an “image problem”. They think it’s a problem of perception, and of mass media bias. In so many words, they will lament that they are misunderstood, that while they’re doing their best the media nevertheless think they’re doing little, and that the public is wrong in thinking them inefficient and corrupt.
Police spokesmen will roll out the statistics when pressed over why, for example, 42 journalists have been killed in this country and no one arrested for any of the murders since 1986, despite the fact that last year the primary suspect in the killing of Pagadian City journalist Edgar Damalerio was a policeman who escaped while already in the custody of his superiors.
They will point out, as one of them did last Thursday during a symposium on violence against the media at the University of the Philippines, that there are only 120,000 policemen among a population of 78 million, and repeatedly say, like a mantra, that there’s only one policeman for every 650 Filipinos.
This particular police spokesman evaded the question of why the policeman-suspect in the Damalerio murder had been allowed back into the service, despite a criminal record. He argued instead that “unlike countries like Singapore,” where crime suspects can be detained for 25 days, the Philippines is “a democratic country” where you have to have proof before anyone can be arrested and charged.
He ignored the fact that two witnesses had identified the suspect in the Damalerio killing, that a judge had issued an arrest warrant for probable cause, and that the 25-day detention period allowed in Singapore law he mentioned is possible only in cases involving national security under the terms of that city-state’s Internal Security Act.
The same spokesman also missed the point about the killing of journalists. He accused some of the murdered journalists of being on the take, or of not being full-time journalists at all—which seemed to suggest that being on the take, and not being a full- time broadcaster or reporter justifies being shot down in the streets.
Like the military’s, police culture is apparently especially resistant to change, or even the idea of change. Few policemen, if any (and the number includes the highest police officials who cling to their posts despite public opprobrium and even the loss of the President’s confidence), will ever admit that the police organization requires not only a change here and there but a thorough overhaul, or even a total dismantling. Instead, most will ascribe the bad reputation the police have in this country to everything else—to bad publicity, or even to a leftist conspiracy—except to the facts of police corruption and inefficiency.
Where’s a policeman when you need one? And why are our streets in chaos and ruled by petty violators of the law, among them bag and cell phone snatchers, pickpockets and petty thieves? The answer to both questions is the same: the policemen who’re supposed to keep order—or to provide the protection people need when they’re being robbed, beaten or raped—are busy doing something else.
The something else can be, for the lower ranks, no more than hanging around the nearest corner store bantering with the low-lifes they’re supposed to be watching, or lazing the day away playing cards in the comforts of an air-conditioned detachment office. For others, it can mean whiling away the time watching x-rated, pirated DVDs, napping and ignoring the emergency phones, and responding to calls for help hours after they’ve been made. (The latter is a police practice so commonly known some police detachments now make it a point to tell people they will respond if called—really.)
To recover from all this hard work, it turns out that some high-ranking policemen and even sergeants make it a habit to hie off in the evenings to the pricey bars and nightclubs that dot Quezon City’s infamous Quezon Avenue, where, so the nightclub owners say, police patronage is critical to their continuing profitability.
Their patronage of these places is equally critical to the police’s “image problem”—to the public’s sense that the police are nothing but a burden to the taxpayers, and what’s worse, part of the problem to which they’re supposed to provide solutions.
Police preference for the kind of “entertainment” offered by bars, even of the sleaziest kind in Cubao, Quezon City, or Sta. Cruz, Manila, is as widely known as the common belief that every policeman has at least two wives. It’s easy enough to see why. Policemen are among the usual trouble-makers in these places, where they have been known to beat or even shoot rivals for the attention of pretty GROs, or to leave without paying.
The high-end bars favored by the police elite are of course not in the same category as the Cubao and Sta. Cruz bars. They demand a different code of behavior. For one thing, it’s not probable that a high-profile policeman will cause a commotion that will land him on the front pages the next day. But his mere presence naturally invites thoughts that he’s either getting drinks and services free, or if he’s paying for them, is doing so with illegally-sourced money, since the company of certain GROs doesn’t come free.
The obvious solution to the “image problem” created by police patronage of bars and nightclubs is not to go to them. The question is why it needed a presidential order for the police hierarchy to enforce a year 2000 circular banning policemen from nightclubs, bars and similar places.
The reactions to the order suggest the answer. Policemen have argued that they need their entertainment, they need to relax and enjoy themselves. One said he likes to drink, and that in his view he’s free to do that in a bar or nightclub as long as he doesn’t abuse anyone. Apparently police culture in this country looks at rules as suggestions they can interpret according to their preferences.
This is all of a piece with the excuses the police make whenever asked why crimes, such as the killing of journalists, go unpunished: it’s never because the rules are not being followed, but because the rules are unreasonable. From such a culture nothing can be expected except more crimes and disasters such as the “escape” of Fathur Al-Ghozi, which the police have explained away as not really the fault of anyone, but of nature in the form of rusty hinges and padlocks
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, September 20, 2003)