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Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Editorial: Counting the bodies
Cebu City residents calling for the summary execution of suspected criminals have gotten what they wished for — five kills last Dec. 22 to 24, and two more with one wounded yesterday — and nobody can claim the sight is pretty.
In the spate of killings that ironically was timed during a season designed to commemorate the birth of Christ, it was apparent the perpetrators, unidentified for now, struck brutally and with an apparent belief the law would not dare touch them.
Those felled down were unarmed, and with no clear intention of committing a crime. The killers shot them while standing or walking or worse, in the case of the two victims in Barangay Carreta, while they were asleep in their homes.
Before the city came down to this, the main argument of sectors demanding the killing of suspected criminals was that nobody is safe anymore. But with unidentified armed men firing at will, even breaking into people’s homes, safety is still not assured.
Others may insist that those killed thus far are people with criminal records and so deserved their fate. The analogy used is that of ridding bad grass, or in Cebuano, sagbot sa katilingban, and that eventually society will be better off without them.
But that is reducing a complex problem like criminality into simplistic
terms, which is erroneous. Robbery, for example, is rooted in need and not done out of caprice. Killing a hundred robbers won’t eradicate robbery.
Besides, the damage inflicted by the killings on the justice system and the rule of law cannot be overemphasized. Then there is the matter of perception: a place where shadowy killers maraud could not lay claim to being a neo-international city.
Acting Cebu City Police Chief Melvin Gayotin and some City Hall officials have denied the police were behind the rash of killings, insisting that Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s brainchild, the so-called Hunter’s Team, has not even been constituted.
But there was a seeming disinterest in their reactions, something that surely inspired the perpetrators and lent credence to the belief they were either allowing or were directly behind the killings.
Which is what is unfortunate in the present situation.
When people commit crimes or allow the commission of such, this can be considered ordinary. But when it is the very government tasked to enforce the law that does so, that is chilling and all of us should therefore brace for the worst.
(December 28, 2004 issue)
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