Roperos: Motorized killers

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

WHILE I acknowledge with sincerity and gratefulness the recent pronouncement of the Philippine National Police (PNP) that its patience has finally run short, and that it is declaring an open war against the country’s motorcycle-riding killers, I have my doubts on the matter of the campaign succeeding.

My doubt is anchored on public apathy, and the incapability of police vehicles being able to move along narrow passageways.

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For the PNP to succeed, it must have total public support and cooperation, meaning that witnesses must be willing to talk and tell the police what they know or saw. And the PNP must also improve its capability to pursue fleeing suspects, meaning that the PNP pursuers must also be skilled riding on motorbikes in tandem, and move along narrow streets and alleys. In a sense, they must be prepared to be as wily as the suspects.

Seriously, I think that the PNP should recruit a new, younger generation of police officers who are deftly trained as motorbike riders in tandem, capable of moving through narrow alleys, and jumping across ditches and canals, with the agility of trained police dogs, on top of being sharpshooters who can fire their side arms from their hips, and hitting their targets like nobody’s business.

You ask why? Well, the motorized killers will also similarly train themselves and strive to become better than their pursuers.

With this in mind, I hope the PNP director general will have the gumption to set aside politics and personal sentiments, and refrain from assigning to the special police anti-motorized tandem-riding killers’ task force any plump, potbellied police officers, no matter how young they are, because they would only hamper the police pursuers’ mobility, not only due to the additional weight on the vehicle, but also on the matter of endurance.

Come to think of it, who was the police national director a number of years ago that ordered all pot-bellied PNP members, as well as those burdened with extra body fat, to strive to reduce themselves or get out of the service? Now, what happened to that national policy? It seems that time, politics, and the economy rode roughshod over that policy, and the “kotong” cops went riding once more across the byways of the republic.

And now comes PNP National Director Nicanor A. Bartolome with his order to go against the “high-profile criminal activities committed with impunity by motorcycle-riding gunmen in the streets.” Truth to tell, I think this is an order that has been long in coming. It took 1,700 incidents of motorized killing incidents and some 2,089 dead victims in 2011 for the nation’s law enforcement leadership to take a decisive action.

And so we hope and pray that the PNP would be lucky enough to succeed.