A tearful bank cashier faced the press yesterday to deny that she was a principal suspect in a multimillion-peso tax diversion scam. Acsa Ramirez turned out to be the whistle blower in the tax scam at the Land Bank of the Philippines. She was giving additional information to the National Bureau of Investigation when she was summoned by President Arroyo last week.
Ramirez must have been excited, thinking she would get a presidential commendation. Instead she was treated as a suspect, and that was how she was presented on TV.
No one dared correct the President, who just recently fired some low-ranking factotum for a similar boo-boo. Now Ramirez herself has come out and exposed the blunder.
The NBI clarified yesterday that the President did not categorically identify Ramirez as a suspect. But the damage has been done.
They could manufacture achievement reports and crime statistics. Under pressure to solve a sensational case, they could – and this has happened too many times in the past – plant evidence or frame up people.
The result is that cases are dismissed by the courts, the innocent are wrongly punished and the real culprits remain free to continue their depredations.
So far most of the suspected kidnappers, muggers and carjackers presented to the public by a gleeful President have been identified by their victims. That minimizes the chance that the wrong people have been caught and, worse, paraded as criminals on prime time news.
But the fiasco over Acsa Ramirez should teach the President a lesson in prudence. In the first place, her lawmen are not famous for honest-to-goodness sleuthing. Some of the biggest criminal cases remain unsolved. If they can’t catch the right suspects, they can easily revert to form and round up some poor sap, pour water laced with chili into his nose and threaten to do it again if he doesn’t own up to a string of pickpocketing cases and behave in front of the President of the Philippines. Believe me, when they’re done with the poor sap, he’ll be ready to own up to the murder of Jose Rizal.
In these dangerous times, many Filipinos prefer the mailed-fist approach to criminality. They shrug when suspected kidnappers are mowed down in purported shootouts with lawmen. They applaud when a man arrested for raping a young girl is shot dead after trying — in his handcuffs — to grab a policeman’s gun. If detained crooks are shot purportedly while trying to escape, people murmur good riddance.
There is only so much that the President can do, however, to drive home the message that her administration is hell-bent on restoring peace and order from Batanes to Sulu. Those photo sessions, with the suspects lined up as if for a firing squad, are getting boring.
When she’s done with the photo sessions, the President should impress upon her top lawmen that their jobs are on the line. All recent surveys have shown that criminality is a principal concern of practically all sectors. Let’s wait for the next survey — an independent one by a reputable pollster, not some unscientific survey by a biased group — and see if her campaign has made a difference. If people are starting to feel safer, it will show.
We’re also for her war on corrupt members of the judiciary. Those temporary restraining orders have become a major source of graft among judges and justices, and the TROs are discouraging investments.
The President, however, should be careful when posing with people she commends in her campaign against lawlessness. Some of the persons seen grinning with her in her photo sessions are themselves notorious for corruption.
Such incidents, along with slip-ups like the one involving Acsa Ramirez, could quickly erode whatever gains the President makes in her high-profile campaign to break the back of criminality.