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Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Editorials: Refusal to help Torres
One largely overlooked point in the arrest of notorious robber Rey Torres is that the government has a responsibility in his treatment after his left leg was shot by the team that captured him in Aurora, Zamboanga del Sur.
When doctors at the Cebu City Medical Center where Torres is confined told Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña that the prisoner does not have the money to buy medicines, the mayor insisted City Hall wouldn’t take care of that.
“Why? Did he take care of the injuries of those he shot?” Osmeña told reporters.
With some sectors tending to be in a lynching mood, and in a situation where some people have welcomed the vigilante-style killings in the city, it is not difficult to gloss over the erroneous analogy or to even pat the mayor’s back for that stance.
Indeed, the idea that Torres should have been killed instead of being merely wounded finds links in the insistence that his jailers should not help in defraying the expenses for his medication, whether he dies in the process or his leg gets amputated.
Even then, it pays to point out that since the police chose not to summarily execute Torres and instead made him their prisoner, they eventually have to consider accepted norms of penology, including inmates’ rights to medical attention.
Of course, it is still debatable whether the medical attention being
given to Torres by government doctors is already appropriate and that helping him to buy the needed medicines is already beyond what is adequate.
Meaning, the mayor could be right in his refusal to help.
But it should not be because of the silly argument that Torres did not “take care of the injuries of those he shot,” not even as a form of punishment or in the hope that what the policemen failed to do in Zamboanga would finally happen in the hospital.
Spot promotion
It is good that police higher-ups are putting the brakes on suggestions to give spot promotions to the members of the team that arrested Rey
Torres pending the usual process of assessing the move’s propriety.
Awards and rewards are in the works, but the spot promotion call is tricky.
While Torres can be considered on top of list of suspected robbers in terms of notoriety, his real role in the big-time robberies in Metro Cebu needs to be ascertained, the better to weigh the significance of his arrest in the overall drive against criminality.
Indeed, it is not difficult to bloat the significance of Torres arrest considering that it is the lone bright spot in the poor anti-crime work of the local police.
(June 21, 2005 issue)
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