Like the boy who cried wolf

The police are saying a Mexican drug cartel has now gained a toehold here. Oh my, when will the police lose the bad habit of stirring up the population? One would have thought that the police are paragons of restraint and common sense.

Sadly, that has never been the case. Instead, the police have grown a reputation of being rash in making announcements. They love to break into the news with some revelation like robbers from, say, Ozamiz have descended on Cebu and are about to embark on a robbing spree.

And then, just as suddenly as they break the news, they withdraw from it like nothing happened. Or they can attempt a little creativity by citing exact figures, like a band of 26 NPAs have been monitored as having been sighted in some remote barangay.

First of all, the police should be reminded that it is always not a good idea to be so precise, lest they be pressed for details that everybody knows they can never provide. Such tales can easily be shot down by one simple question -- what have the police done about it?

When you claim to have monitored the presence of a group of 26 people, be they NPAs or robbers, the precise number cited gives the impression that you really know what you are talking about. And if you know what you are talking about, certainly you must now be doing something about it.

If you have reached the point in your monitoring that you know exactly how many people are in your sights, why have you not moved in? What are you waiting for? Why not pounce and make arrests, since you are presumably close enough to know the numbers?

But of course no arrests will ever follow those disclosures to media, which the media obligingly air or publish, for no other reason that they came from official sources such as the police, and never mind if such disclosures are as wishy-washy as they come.

Take this supposed discovery of a Mexican drug cartel. If the disclosure is true, why the heck is the police disclosing the fact prematurely? I say prematurely because otherwise arrests of members directly involved in the cartel would have been made already.

As it is, the police say there are just investigating, having arrested a couple of suspects that are merely under suspicion of being linked to the cartel. There goes the carnival. If the police are in fact still investigating, why advertise the operation? I thought the best method of probing something is to do it quietly.  My guess is that it is just to stir things up a bit to give the impression the police are always on their toes. Well, the police should be told that the public does not need to be told. The public expects the police to be on their toes all the time as law enforcers.

In other words, the police do not have to keep reminding people that they exist. We do not need reminders. Just do your job and when you have done it well, by making arrests or busts, then that will be the best proof the people will ever need.

Police work requires action, not words. People will never be convinced that the police are doing their jobs by mere public disclosures of criminals being sighted or monitored. If you have these criminals in your sights we do not care if you shoot them or arrest them. Just do something.

The surest way to lose trust and respect is for the police to keep titillating the public about robbers and communist rebels, and now Mexican drug cartels being sighted and monitored, only to suddenly grow quiet later simply because there was nothing to the yarn in the first place.

What a great rejoicing there would be if, suddenly, from out of the blue, the police, after months of working hard under the radar, suddenly calls for a press conference and then parades before the public 26 people who can either be robbers, communists, or Mexican drug peddlers. That would be a perfect coup.

If the police keep advertising something and then come up short on what is advertised, there will come a time when nobody will even sit up and notice, and the police will eventually become irrelevant, just like the boy who cried wolf.