A police force cannot shoot straight if blinded by its own rosy statistics

Police Director General Hermogenes E. Ebdane, Jr., rang me up early yesterday morning in response to my column on "rising kidnapping", saying the PNP has been redoubling its efforts. He didn’t contest my disclosures that kidnapping children and teens between ages five and 15 had virtually become an organized industry, but said he would send me more information on what the police are doing.

He reiterated an invitation earlier received by this writer to attend the 12th anniversary celebration of the PNP’s creation at Camp Crame. Those rites, with President GMA presiding, will be based on the theme, Isang Pulisya, Isang Bansa: Matatag na Republika ang Dakilang Adhika. There will be a great many humorous translations of this "great goal" of a "stable Republic". As for "One Police, One Country", the jesters will quip that all they ask for, really, is one good policeman in the right place, at the right time – meaning in time of danger or urgent need.

Somehow, when you need one, as when former New People’s Army Chieftain, reformed, Rolly Kintanar was gunned down at High Noon in a Japanese restaurant in Quezon City, there’s no "cop in the block".

This happy day of commemoration should be no time, however, to cast stones, but to issue words of encouragement. I don’t want, to use the old expression, to rain on their parade. On the other hand, the PNP has been sanguine enough to admit, in a paper distributed to editorial offices just days before the anniversary, that its major task is "earning the public’s trust through hard work". The briefing paper asserted: "Aside from the increasing number of crimes being committed, criminals are getting more devious and ingenious in pulling one heist after another."

The PNP admits that it’s "hard to solicit the public’s cooperation" owing to such things as "reluctance and apathy". Sure, some witnesses – as the PNP document points out – "are reluctant to speak for fear of retaliation from the criminals". It’s not just fear of criminals, I must interject – it’s fear of the police. Either our citizens don’t believe in the ability or will of our cops to protect them, or there are many who subscribe to the thought that too many policemen are criminals themselves.

The PNP, it’s been said ad infinitum, not only has to reform itself, but become more diligent, courageous and trustworthy in the eyes of the threatened public. This is, of course, a twice-told tale. How do you separate the good from the bad, and the latter from spoiling the good, in a barrel which contains too many rotten apples?

When the chips are down, it’s only the policeman who stands between the defenseless citizenry and the evildoers – robbers, rapists, kidnappers and killers. Fielding a force of good policemen, tough enough to meet the challenge, nimble enough to be everywhere needed, morally strong and dedicated enough to resist temptation, including the temptation to cut and run, and on friendly (not aloof) terms with those they protect – may be a tall order: But it’s got to be filled. It’s a "matter of life and death."

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General Jun Ebdane asked the chief of PACER – the Police Anti-Crime & Emergency Response special unit against kidnapping – to comment on yesterday’s column. Police Senior Supt. (Colonel) Alan La Madrid Purisima sent us the following response. He said that PACER’s records "reveal that on January 2002 there were 13 cases reported. For this year we have only 5 cases. Of these 5 cases, 4 were considered solved; i.e., the cases were filed in court and the majority of the perpetrators were arrested, and the remnants are targets of a massive manhunt operation. The other one is still a live case as of this writing."

To illustrate police progress, I guess, Purisima noted that there were 99 KFR (kidnapping for ransom) cases, while only 67 cases were reported in 2002. "Based on records," he asserted, "comparing 2001 with 2002 we have reduced KFR incidents by 32 or 32.32 percent. By just looking at it, one can safely say that incidents of kidnapping are significantly decreasing."

The colonel gave as "the main reason for the decline of KFR incidents" the "neutralization of the big-time KFR syndicates, wherein their remnants are the subjects of massive manhunt operations by the authorities. With the capture of the personalities in KFR, cases of previous years were solved as in the case of Mae Ling Ang, wherein the apprehension of Captain Marlon Belarmino PA solved the case. Further, with the arrest of perpetrators in Tan KFR case in Iloilo City, three other previous KFR cases were solved, namely, the KFR cases of Ledesma, Pineda and Barrera."

Purisima does have a good point when he complains that the police "have filed a lot of KFR cases in court, (but) cases filed by the defunct PAOCTF way back as far as 1996 are still undergoing trial. The slowness of our justice system in resolving the case is one of the factors that encourages the perpetration of the crime of kidnap-for-ransom plus the issue of poverty wherein people who wanted a huge sum of money will face any risks, even death."

C’mon, Colonel. Admittedly PACER has made some spectacular, headline-grabbing arrests (and, fortunately, kills), but let’s not get preachy about "poverty" as a motivating factor. The kidnappers are rich bastards – they didn’t grab, and even torture and kill, because they resented being poor. They were just greedy hoodlums, and now they’re wealthy, greedy hoods who’re lusting for more. Sanamagan, some of them were cops, too. Which is why, as I repeated yesterday, most of the victims don’t tell the police.

Former Speaker Sonny Belmonte, who’s now Quezon City mayor, and I were on the police beat when the tag "Manila’s Finest" really befitted the Manila police force, which had cops pounding the beat and keeping neighborhoods safe (I know because I was a Paco boy). In those days, the detective bureau really solved crimes without their inspectors regaling us newsmen with every wild theory and statistics they could spin off the top of their heads. Pulling information out of those dicks was more difficult than pulling teeth: But they got their man (or woman). Purisima is right, though, about the courts. In those good old days, the judges really sent the crooks to jail, or to the death chamber – with finality and dispatch.

The PNP does a great disservice to the nation and to itself when it persists in hiding behind its own statistics. Every streetwise cop knows that there’s much more crime and far more serious crime than is being reported by our frightened people, who no longer know whom to trust. And, when suspects in heinous crimes and convicts themselves manage to escape so easily from police custody or from our prisons, witnesses are reluctant to come forth because they might become dead witnesses – for dead men tell no tales.

What’s vital is for faith to be restored in the police, in our courts and justice system, in our penal system – and in the mailed fist of the law.

By the way, the persistent rumor that General Ebdane will "soon be replaced" for failure to cope (obviously circulated by ambitious rivals, eager to take his place) does the President who’s striving for a "strong Republic", the entire police establishment, and the public no good. Who’ll snap to attention and follow the leadership of a Police Chief who’s bombarded with intrigue and whose tenure may seem shaky? The President and commander-in-chief must declare, without a wink or a nod, that she’s backing Ebdane all the way – or else take the consequences of this debilitating deterioration of police – and inevitably, civilian morale. We’re tired of those games of "musical chairs" which are being played to give the semblance of reform or revamp.

We need a police force which has force – and credibility. The most important business, after all (and without which no other business can be conducted and prosper) is the business of survival.

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The "State of the Union" address yesterday by US President George W. Bush received many standing ovations in US Congress, and from the sound-bytes and reaction reports from America, plaudits all over that embattled nation. Bush is no longer Dubious Dubya of the win-by-a-whisker Florida poll-count, but finally President of the United States of America, "from sea to shining sea". Beyond those seas, however, stock markets in Europe and Asia took a nose-dive – but what the heck: This always happens when there are war clouds thundering on the horizon.

Bush didn’t speak much about the coming war, but what he said was enough. The only thing he didn’t do was urge the solons and guests present, and Americans listening at their TV monitors, to rise up and belt out a chorus of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

He focused on the home front, wisely, indeed. ("It’s the economy, stupid", the jibe which had, bedevilled dear old dad surely resonated at the back of his head, and those of his speech-writers and spin-doctors.) On the other hand, while snap reactions seem to run in Bush’s favor, there’s no doubt the naysayers will shortly be gathering voice, too. Every word he uttered will be picked to pieces in the days to come. But he pulled it off. That’s my comment, hopefully worth the proverbial two cents.

What American Presidents say and what they do are, of course, not always compatible with each other. Yet, yesterday Bush the Younger demonstrated that he knows where America’s wars are fought and won, not on some foreign front with strange-sounding names, but in the streets, the homes and hearths of America. If America’s leaders lose there, then they cannot win anywhere.

Tom Brokaw spoke of "the best generation", the boys and girls, men and women, at home and abroad, who gave everything they had without question in the 1940s because they felt their flag and country required it. There is surely a nostalgia in a fragmented, cynical, disillusioned, fractious, polyglot nation, exhausted, perhaps, by being compelled to keep up the image of being a "superpower", for the verities and the innocence of purpose of such a generation long past. However, as Thomas Wolfe lamented in his 1929 Look Homeward, Angel novel, you can never go home again.

The Americans may still have, reluctantly, to thank Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 bombers for giving their national unity and resurgence of patriotism a shot-in-the-arm. Any action against Iraq, naturally, will be condemned roundly around the world, as everyone can already plainly see. The Muslim world, on the verge of the annual Haj, will recoil in resentment, and there will be turmoil on the Arab street. Western Europe, whose own imperialist history is as black as "manifest destiny", is already uttering strong words of condemnation and blame. But the "barbaric" Americans – or Gringos and Norteamericanos as they say south of the border – cannot and will not back down. They’re not unpredictable – they are very predictable. It’s no surprise that Frank Sinatra’s favorite song was I did it my way.

The America of Dubya Bush isn’t marching to the beat of a different drum – it’s always been their way.