Crime pays

We thought the heinous killings of our sons were the end of it.” This was the statement made last week by the rueful and angry fathers of car dealers Emerson Lozano and Venson Evangelista, who were both brutally murdered within days of each other in January this year, their bodies burned beyond recognition. And of course, they thought wrong. In fact, they were speaking at the wake for another victim of car thieves who killed without hesitation or compunction, much like those who had murdered their sons.

On Wednesday last week, Teresa Teano, a 54-year-old mother of three, had just parked in front of the Brahma Kumaris School on Kamuning Street in Quezon City when two armed men approached and demanded the keys to her brand-new car. When she resisted and shouted for help, they shot her twice, hitting her in the head and in the arm. The killers then boarded the car and drove away, running over Teano’s body sprawled on the sidewalk.

It could have been just another day in the country’s carnapping capital, but for the brutality and the brazenness with which the crime was carried out. “Look at how daring they were,” Odon Teano said of his daughter’s killers. “They did it at 7 a.m. when students were going to their schools and employees were going to their offices.”

In an earlier interview, the victim’s father pointed out that Kamuning is a busy street, but the police were “nowhere to be found” when the attack on his daughter happened. “There is a breakdown of the peace and order situation, and the criminals are more daring than the police,” said the older Teano, a former regional director of the Department of Interior and Local Government and consultant of the Internal Affairs Service of the Philippine National Police. And, we might add, better at scouting places where the police are unlikely to be, which does not really take too much effort since police “visibility” still remains very much on the wish list of an increasingly fearful public.

No doubt about it, the criminals in our midst have become more daring and brazen. And they can only become even bolder when the police are not around to “serve and protect” the people and our communities as they proudly but emptily declare and when crime not only goes mostly unpunished but remains very profitable.

Crime clearly pays handsomely in the case of car thieves, not only because cars are expensive but also because selling them is so easy. There are laws that are supposed to stop the illegal trade, but the way they are carried out, or more precisely ignored and violated, they might as well not exist. It doesn’t take much to get a police clearance or have a second-hand car registered with or without such clearance.

License plates, which are primarily meant to identify each vehicle, no longer serve the function. Many cars sport plates that cannot be read either because the paint has faded after so many years of use or because they are covered with opaque “plate protectors” or commemorative plates. Some vehicle owners simply fabricate their own plates, as the police recently discovered when alert traffic policemen spotted and apprehended three different taxicabs bearing the same plate number all in one day. Such violations have become so commonplace that few people notice them anymore, including those who are supposed to help enforce laws and government regulations.

Police presence is, of course, a powerful deterrent to crime, but obviously there are limits to the PNP’s capacity to extend it. Unless parallel efforts are made to squeeze out the profit from carjacking, we will see no end to the thieving and killing.