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Monday, December 27, 2004
Amante: A few good men
By Isolde D. Amante
THESE days, talk of the Cebu City mayor’s “hunter team” reminds me of what’s probably the hammiest movie scene of all time.
“I want the truth,” huffs Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise), a poster boy for high-minded human rights advocates as he investigates the sudden death of a young recruit. And Col. Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) glares at him and snarls, “You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You?”
It’s exactly the sort of question you can picture the mayor or a policeman lobbing at you, next time you ask about what guidelines they’ll be using as they “search for and destroy” criminals they hope to “permanently disable or neutralize.”
There’s nothing wrong with identifying and picking up neighborhood thugs with pending arrest warrants. It’s the hazy, sweeping mandate that’s worrisome. Is an order to effect “permanent disability” a thinly veiled command to shoot and kill? It certainly sounds like it, despite the token avowals of keeping within the bounds of the law.
Will the mayor and his sharpshooters be open, for instance, to civilian review of each case this new team ends up handling? This sounds like a service the People’s Law Enforcement Board can provide. After all, the tasks of crime prevention and urban safety can’t be dumped entirely on law enforcement’s overburdened shoulders.
And what can local neighborhoods contribute, barring unconditional and unquestioning support for the mayor’s hunters? Well-organized citizens’ watch groups can do more than prevent burglaries and petty crime: they restore social bonds, remind us of the need to help guard our communities. Lawyers can teach people how the justice system works, or at least make its language more accessible to all.
In cases monitored by the United Nations-Habitat “Safer Cities Program,” successful crime-prevention efforts included better protection for public spaces. Communities formed safety coalitions, where information about crime was exchanged and studied. They conducted safety audits, examined the public services made available to areas where lawlessness was rampant, and helped the police gather hard data about the victims of crimes.
More information, not less, was key. The danger, warns Habitat, lies in “a generalized and often not objective fear, an insecurity that crystallizes all the fears of the population: insecurity with respect to their jobs, health, the future of their children, domestic violence, the risk of impoverishment.” People can handle the truth, whatever Jessep and his ilk might say. And the truth is that men with guns must heed the rules, because that is what sets them apart from the criminals they run after. (ida(at)sunstar(dot)com(dot)ph)
(December 27, 2004 issue)
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