EDITORIAL - Are we a city under siege?

What is this? What is going on? First there has been a resurgence of killings in Cebu, regardless of whether these killings are the handiwork of so-called vigilantes or of somebody else. Now Cebuanos are being told a group of bank robbers from Mindanao has just landed.

What is this? What is going on? Are we under attack? Are we in a war zone? One would have thought that with policemen in virtually every street corner, courtesy of Asean Summit security preparations, criminals would have been compelled to lie low, or maybe scoot somewhere else.

What is happening instead is that, if these are really criminals striking, which is what we are subtly being made to understand, law-breakers are thumbing their noses at the authorities and sneering at everyone else.

From the start, Cebuanos have always been wary of the notion that there are vigilantes in their midst. From the start, it was a vile and criminal idea foisted upon a hapless constituency by you-know-who.

It would not be surprising, however, if somewhere along the way, someone took advantage of the built-in alibi for wanton extermination. Now it would be difficult to clearly ascertain which are the handiwork of the so-called vigilantes and which are those of copycats.

But why are the killings going on? Have the infusion of hundreds of policemen imported from other places not tempered the consuming desire of vigilantes to kill or scared the copycats from emulating the killings?

Our suspicion is that, nay, we do not suspect since it has become pretty obvious by now. We believe that there have never been any vigilantes in the first place. The specter was just floated to provide a scapegoat for the most vile kind of social cleansing.

Crime and all efforts to curb it can also be a nifty enterprise to engage in. Bank robbers? Bah. It has become too insulting even to average intelligence to keep on being fed information such as this when all that is needed is proof of a job well done.