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Saturday, December 10, 2005
Editorials: Helpless law enforcers
Cebu City policemen are at it again, passing to the victim the blame that should have been partly theirs to take, too, on the failure to solve a worrisome crime incident.
Acting Cebu City Police Director Melvin Gayotin, like what he did on the failure of the Cebu City Police Office to stop the vigilante-style killings in Cebu City, blamed the family of a kidnapping victim for not informing them about the incident.
Apparently, the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) only learned about the alleged kidnapping of a son of a Carbon Market trader and the subsequent paying of a P7.5 million ransom from a recent Sun.Star Cebu report.
And the supposed kidnapping incident happened last month yet.
Worrisome
This kind of helplessness is worrisome considering that if the incident did happen, this is the first time in years that a kidnap-for-ransom operation involving millions of pesos was successfully conducted in Cebu.
While Gayotin said that it didn’t involve an organized kidnapping syndicate like those operating in Mindanao and Luzon, that is not reassuring enough.
One, how can Gayotin be so sure? Besides, even if the kidnapping were done by small-timers, the fact that they succeeded would be invitation enough for the big-timers to try their luck here, too.
Not only CCPO
In fairness to Gayotin, however, other police units, especially the Presidential Anti-Crime Emergency Response, should also be scored for their failure to even get wind of the kidnapping operation.
It looks like the lack of kidnapping incidents the past several years has made rusty the machinery that was set up in Cebu to fight kidnapping.
And the danger there is if kidnap-for-ransom would go the way of vigilante-style killings, bank robberies and even petty criminality: able to breed because of a variety of reasons, including law enforcers’ lack of creativity and determination.
Two-way street
In this sense, it would be good to remind law enforcers that while it is true that public cooperation will go a long way in solving crime incidents, the main responsibility is still with them.
It would be wrong to profess helplessness every time victims or their relatives, for one reason or another, don’t file a complaint or don’t inform them about an incident.
Policemen are being paid and trained precisely to take the lead in preventing the occurrence of crimes and when these occur solving them, and not to wait for victims or their families—or, okay, the public—to complain.
Indeed, what would you call law enforcers who only know about major crime incidents when they read it in newspapers?
(December 10, 2005 issue)
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