Tuesday, October 09, 2007 Editorials: Drive-by shooting in Cebu City
THE drive-by shooting that killed three people and wounded four others in Cebu City Thursday night has again proved the utter helplessness of law enforcers.
Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) Director Patrocinio Comendador has obviously found it difficult to explain the failure of his unit to prevent the killings or solve it.
He may not admit it but he still has a long way to go if he wants to whip the CCPO into an effective anti-crime force, although that is true with other police units.
Failure to prevent the occurrence of crime incidents or to immediately respond to it cannot just be attributed to, for example, the ratio of policemen with population.
Effective law enforcement is not only about having enough cops and funding but is also about how police officials effectively use limited personnel and funds.
Creativity is one of the key words there.
Community
But it would be useless to belabor the point considering that this has become a cycle of criminal incidents, public uproar, police failings, back to criminal incidents, etc.
That cycle can perhaps be broken if we shift our attention to the failings of the community, and which would refer mostly to barangay residents and their officials.
The CCPO already has mechanisms in place to tap the community’s help, like in information data gathering, an example of which are the barangay intelligence networks.
But either the setup is defective or it is inadequate.
This is observable in that drive-by shooting where the police were caught off-guard when it happened and were at a loss in pinpointing the culprits after the incident.
Everybody
Tapping the help of the community, however, can’t be effective if doing it is left solely to the initiative of the police or if one pins hope on people’s voluntary action.
City Hall officials can help in this regard by using the human infrastructure available to them, like the barangay chiefs who are mostly politically aligned with them.
They should come up with the most effective mechanism to gather community-based information that would help the police in crime prevention and investigation.
The suspects in that drive-by shooting were able to do their thing and evade immediate arrest partly because of ineffective or slow intelligence information work.
Everybody should help solve the inadequacy in this regard.
