COUNTING one’s blessings must be tough if nothing’s more constant than holding a handcuff. Too bad, even if they are the first to respond in the face of situations gone scary, they may as well wish for the last laugh of the mad. Grim work, and the wisecracks are wrapped around them a fat lot.
“How many cop jokes are there?” Scratch the head, or snicker with this rib-tickling reply: “Just two, all the rest are true!”
Lies, if you say law enforcers have luck on their side where humor and horror flank them in their daily line of duty. A hyper-masculine job could be jazzed up to soften the edgy dimension of drama—a traffic enforcer on motorcycle found himself in a viral video, balancing survival and self-respect with his sideline of selling rice cakes to motorists in country’s busiest avenue.
As reported, “he was shaking in fear,” worried of a reprimand when the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) summoned him, and “became teary-eyed” when he ended up praised for being “a hard worker.”
Sweat the small stuff, no way! Thus a police officer in Cebu went far with his fairy-tale scam involving an investment for “a non-existent financing firm for customers of a casino.” He was arrested after running away with “more than P1 million” from top-ranking officials and non-commissioned officers even as he was also accused to have “allegedly duped a lawyer, retired police officer and civilian.”
Another report tagged another policeman from Mindanao for a spate of robberies in the city. Who’s scared of the cops? Not the two thugs who fled with their loot of cash from a convenience store just a scream away from the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO)
headquarters.
Where crime appears as easy as children squirting their water pistols, the public gaze can only wait for a face-saving act of authorities wiping the splatter of disrespect.
Honor is Herculean enough even for priests, and it’s no less a burden for policemen.
Not only is it a routine for them to deal with the odds and ends of danger, officers are also obliged to take the straight and narrow while toeing the line of discretion between crime control and due process.
On one hand, they must be highly accountable in upholding professionalism while having their other arm outstretched for a salary worth going out on a limb for. Such a tightrope act! Such breathtaking sigh of disgrace that could only wrack the silence of honest-to-goodness public servants—be they teachers or cops—who must endure such indignities where corruption has become pop culture.
Ouch, the glut of stories down the gutter about their colleagues in uniform! But not even cops in more affluent countries like the United States can boast to their Third-World counterparts that they are better off, too bad.
Good if it were true that American law enforcers did not have to worry about the worth of their badge. Some of them, however, have been slipping through the so-called pay gap across America’s rural and metropolitan areas that leave “some officers earning a comfortable middle-class living and others scraping by on poverty and near poverty wages.”
In a recent NBC report about cops having to opt “for second work as private security gigs, such as in private bars,” a University of Pittsburgh law professor said that some “communities are saddled with a police force that is underpaid…”
Indeed, they will likely feel at home here in Cebu or elsewhere in this sunny republic. Where there’s always room enough for risk-taking, opportunities remain both open as handshake and reachable as the moon-shaped spaces in a handcuff.
(geemyko@gmail.com)