FROM June 13 to 18, police teams in Metro Manila arrested nearly 3,000 individuals in response to President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to dissuade “tambays” or loiterers.
The 2,981 were arrested not for loitering, which is no longer illegal, but for violating local ordinances. Nearly a third of those picked up were minors found violating curfew, PNP Chief Oscar Albayalde said. Other violations included littering, urinating in public, and “loitering while half-naked.”
It’s comical that police officers had to devote their energy and time in going after 651 persons who were presumably shirtless in public. (If they were half-naked in other ways, the offense would probably have been grave scandal.) But the arrests do raise the need for clearer guidelines.
What exactly did the President order? In a report updated Tuesday, Rappler posted a video of President Duterte’s speech last June 14, when he told newly promoted police officers to convince loafers to go home. “You be strict,” he said. “They are potential trouble for the public.”
To enforce that without running afoul of the law, the police and the barangay tanods who assist them have to know what their city or town prohibits. There used to be a provision in the Revised Penal Code against “loitering about public or semi-public buildings or places or trampling or wandering about the country or the streets without visible means of support.” But Congress amended that six years ago.
When Republic Act 10158 took effect in 2012, it cut short a list of five forms of vagrancy under Article 202. Only prostitution remains illegal in that amended article. It’s no longer illegal, for example, to be a person who has “the physical ability to work and who neglects to apply himself or herself to some lawful calling.” It’s no longer illegal to loiter, unless one also defies an ordinance, such as by “willfully causing loud and disturbing noises” between the hours of 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. in Cebu City.
Part of the challenge for police is that each community defines offenses against good customs differently. What may be illegal in one city may be acceptable in the next. They have to know and be reminded of their limits. But there’s a challenge here for communities, too.
What behavioral economists call “nudges” and social marketing can be used to discourage poor choices like littering, urinating in public, and yes, causing “loud and disturbing” noises when your neighbors are trying to get some sleep. These need not be left to police forces who surely have other, more urgent priorities to attend to, like solving actual crimes.