Crime and lawlessness

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4. Does anyone remember anything special about that day? If the banner headlines the following morning were any indication, it was a rather slow day for earth-shaking news. The impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona had wrapped up its third week before an increasingly bored public audience, as a prosecution scraping the bottom of its competency barrel and a defense trigger-happy with technicalities  jointly succeeded in miring the proceedings in endless tangles. The death in London of Negros Occidental Rep. Iggy Arroyo, meanwhile, brought up the spectacle of his estranged wife and his longtime companion (backed up, incidentally, by Arroyo’s own daughter) squaring off over who had the right to bring the legislator’s body home.

The more consequential news lay buried in the inside pages. Last Saturday, it turned out, was quite a busy day for criminals up and down the archipelago. In North Cotabato, two men were ambushed by motorbike-riding gunmen and declared dead on arrival at the hospital. In Bacolod City, a policeman fired on an employee of the Development Bank of the Philippines and killed him along with his 16-year-old nephew. Up north in Nueva Ecija, another ambush occurred, this time against the mayor of Carranglan town and his driver, again by assailants riding a motorcycle. Fortunately, the two victims survived. No such luck for a village chief in Catarman, Northern Samar, who came under fire from suspected communist rebels who even felt confident enough to waylay the man and his wife on the open road in broad daylight.

In Quezon City, a security guard lost his life to two men who attempted to rob a money transfer establishment. And, in a case that qualified as among the most bizarre in recent memory, a Chinese businessmen earlier accused of killing his Filipino girlfriend and who was said to have admitted to the crime was himself killed when he allegedly grabbed the gun of a police escort and shot himself in the chin, while being escorted to the Manila City Prosecutor’s Office for inquest proceedings.

All these in one day. Was Saturday’s panorama of violence and lawlessness a unique, one-off phenomenon? Not likely. It came, after all, on the heels of even more alarming news from the previous days, the most sensational of which was the harrowing attack on University of the Philippines’ student Lordei Camille Hina by robbers inside UP’s Vinzons Hall. Hina remains in critical condition after having been bashed on the head with a trophy and assaulted with an ice pick. In separate incidents a few days later, similar if less violent thievery also victimized a teenage student of the College of St. Benilde, who was divested of his iPad and mobile phone by two knife-wielding men aboard a jeepney, while an electronics company personnel manager saw his computer bag containing a laptop, computer accessories and wallet snatched away right outside his own home, as he was opening the door to his house.

Wait, there’s more. Can the political front be far behind when it comes to aggression and bloodshed? Zambales, in particular, is simmering these days with the recent special congressional election in the province’s second district, on the eve of which a bodyguard of former Zambales governor Amor Deloso was shot dead in a clash with some policemen manning a checkpoint in Botolan town. And in Tawi-Tawi, in what has become a depressingly commonplace instance of banditry in that benighted region, two foreigners and a Filipino tour guide on a bird-watching tour were abducted by heavily armed men. The Filipino guide, well-known travel writer and blogger Ivan Sarenas, later managed to escape, but the two foreign victims remain in captivity, presumably being held for ransom. There goes the country’s efforts to reboot itself for the international tourist market.

We are tempted to repeat former vice president Emmanuel Pelaez’s haunting cri de coeur once upon a time: “What is happening to our country?” But we’d like to be more blunt. What is the Aquino administration and the Philippine National Police doing about the rampant, brazen criminality bedeviling the country? Taken cumulatively, the outbreak of atrocities big and small points to a deteriorating, if not broken, law enforcement environment. Criminals are getting bolder and more vicious, their crimes more gruesome. A testament to how desperate times are? Perhaps. But also, and more simply, an indication that the government is, at this point, not doing enough to strike the fear of the law in scoundrels’ hearts.