Short cuts

Capital punishment was abolished in this country in 2006, which was just as well, because no one wanted to enforce it, anyway. Also, Pinoy lawmen have always had a quicker way of eliminating lowlifes: one bullet and a thug is gone. Swift justice, and so much cheaper than lethal injection.

The quickest death seems to be reserved for killers of children. Several years ago an arrested suspect was shot dead by Manila policemen who said he tried to grab the gun of his captors. The man had been identified by a state witness as the one who raped, tortured and killed an eight-year-old girl. People who had been horrified by the grisly crime sighed with relief, said good riddance and moved on.

Yesterday another man tagged by witnesses as the murderer of eight people, five of them children, was shot dead in what Southern Tagalog cops said was a shootout.

Dead men tell no tales. But even if farmhand Bernabe Fiesta had lived to tell his version of the supposed armed encounter, he would not have received much public sympathy in this country.

Filipinos, exasperated with the slow pace of justice and corruptible prosecutors and judges, have often looked the other way when cops resort to short cuts in law enforcement.

Tolerance for such short cuts is highest when the victims include children, or when a crime spree has started affecting the economy, driving away investors and reducing purchasing power.

Few tears were shed when the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission (PACC) started gunning down members of the Red Scorpion Group in the 1990s. Kidnappers at the time targeted Chinese-Filipino schoolchildren, but the RSG also went after adult victims, among them American businessman Michael Barnes. 

The PACC, at the time under police officer Panfilo Lacson, was under pressure to produce results by then vice president Joseph Estrada, the designated chief crime-buster of the Ramos administration.

In 1993, Estrada announced a purported shootout between RSG members and PACC agents – three hours before the encounter occurred. Some reports said six of the RSG members had in fact been arrested, but were reported killed the next day in a supposed shootout.

When human rights advocates cried foul, Estrada always argued that the rights of crime victims came first. Filipinos agreed with him – and with Lacson’s methods — so much they sent Erap to Malacañang by the largest margin ever in 1998, and Lacson to the Senate after Erap was ousted.

With such an approach to crime so well-received by a public disappointed with the weakness of the criminal justice system, the short cuts persist.

Whether or not there really was an armed encounter, for many Filipinos, anyone who empties an M-16 into huts where sleeping children lie deserves to be summarily executed. Bernabe Fiesta will have to argue his case in hell, where there is no chance of escape or presidential pardon.

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But there is a price to pay for such short cuts, most notable of which is that cops don’t always get the right suspect. Every innocent person framed so cops can announce that a case has been solved means that the real crook remains at large, willing and able to commit more crimes.

Worse than honest mistakes are deliberate abuses perpetrated in the name of law enforcement. A favorite method of stopping burglaries and petty thievery in a particular community, for example, is by executing several suspects, leaving their corpses with cardboard tags identifying them as criminals. Not all of those “salvage” victims are guilty.

But even if those executed are truly guilty, is the punishment commensurate to the crime? There are Filipinos who will say yes.

Invested by a tolerant public with the power of life and death, there are cops who develop a cavalier attitude toward collateral damage in the course of neutralizing hardened criminals.

Such cops develop a cavalier attitude toward life in general, making them see killing as an acceptable means to an end, even in partisan politics. Much of the violence perpetrated during election campaigns in this country is the handiwork of men in uniform, who serve as members of politicians’ private armies.

PACC members are still facing legal problems over the deaths of Kuratong Baleleng gang leader Wilson Soronda and a female relative, who were shot in a separate incident shortly after 11 gang members were wiped out in a police raid on their safehouse in 1995.

It was not surprising that PACC members, given more powers and renamed the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force during the Estrada administration, were implicated in the kidnapping, torture and murder of publicist Salvador “Bubby” Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito. Dacer was supposed to have in his possession documents damaging to the Erap administration. The case is still in court.

While short cuts deliver swift justice, they make for poor criminal investigation. Summary executions — “salvaging” or rubouts — keep crooks, whether deliberately or inadvertently, from identifying coddlers in the police, military or civilian government.

It would have been interesting to find out from the ringleaders of the RSG and the Kuratong Baleleng if there were cops behind their operations.

If the murderers of those nine RCBC bank employees and a security guard in Cabuyao, Laguna are ever caught, the public would want to know if they enjoy the protection of police or military personnel. Or perhaps some of the killers are lawmen themselves.

Bernabe Fiesta used the M-16 of his uncle, retired cop Florencio Peria, who is in police custody. Peria seems like the one who tipped off the raiding team about his house, where Fiesta was found and allegedly engaged the cops in a shootout.

There are cops who see public tolerance toward short cuts to law enforcement as a license to kill. We readily look the other way unless the innocent victim happens to be someone we know or, worse, is dear to us.