Pampanga cops hail zero crime rate since Christmas holidays

ANGELES CITY – Who says crime rate jacks up during the Christmas season?

Spare this city. Since Dec. 22, the police in this city of 700,000 has not registered a single crime.

“Since the holidays began, our six police stations have noted zero crime rate. No case of pickpocketing, no cellphone snatching, nothing,” city police spokesperson Senior Superintedent Gemma Vinluan told The STAR yesterday.

“We’re really amused by this and we hope this will go on indefinitely,” she said.

“My boss asked me what I did to bust the crime rate to zero, but I suppose it’s really the result of genuine police visibility,” said Vinluan who is also the operations chief of the police of this city which used to be dubbed as “Sin City” during the era of the Americans at their former military base at Clark, now a freeport. This, despite the ratio of one cop per 1,838 population as against the ideal one for every 500.

Vinluan said that since the holidays, the local police force of 389 uniformed men and women have been on 12-hour shifts to make their presence felt 24 hours a day all over the city. She noted one case of a minor brawl between relatives in a drinking bout, but the police pacified them without anyone filing a formal complaint.

Asked whether the cops are getting overtime pay, Vinluan said no, adding that “we’re used to working over the usual eight hours a day without extra pay anyway.” But she said that apart from the regular police force, there are also 35 police trainees at work.

“We also have so many civilian volunteers for peace and order, including those from the Citizen’ Crime Watch, Cobra and Barkada 2K,” she said.

Vinluan said the morale of city cops have been boosted by the 12 brand new vehicles turned over recently by Mayor Francis Nepomuceno, including three all-terrain vehicles and four motorcycles which enable policemen to patrol even narrow alleys.

Earlier, city police chief Senior Superintendent Pierre Bucsit said that even before the local crime rate dropped to zero, crimes in this city went down from an average of six to four percent since June arising from increased police visibility particularly in crime-prone areas.

He identified the crime-prone areas as downtown Barangay Sto. Entierro and the Barangay Balibago commercial district near the tourist belt at Friendship Avenue.