TUGUEGARAO CITY, Cagayan – While police officials in the rest of the country have their hands busy fighting crimes with varying degrees of intensity, their counterparts in the island province of Batanes are fighting another more intense battle: a battle against boredom.
According to Senior Superintendent Delfin Millo, Batanes provincial police director, no criminal incidents have been reported in the whole province since his assumption to the post last July, thus depriving his men of the chance of at least using their guns as warning shots.
In fact, Millo said, practically no untoward incidents have been reported in the whole of Batanes, the country’s northern backdoor, since June this year.
The only exception to this was the head-on collision of two motorcycles along the main road in Batan Island, the province’s main island with four towns, last July, with one of the drivers dead from injury. The incident in itself was highly unusual for a province with only around 50 government and public utility vehicles.
No other complaints have been recorded in any of the blotters of police stations of the province’s six towns except for a complaint about one stolen coconut crab in Uyugan town, and that of a stolen piglet in Ivana sometime in September. And with regard to the piglet, the thieves, apparently fearing that they might be identified later returned it to the owner the following day.
“In fact, we practically have no reason to fire our guns so that if we don’t clean them regularly, they might get jammed from disuse. In fact, we don’t even have a firing range,” said Milllo.
Millo also said that nobody is at present locked up in any of the province’s jails, even in any of the town jails, except for the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP) detention area where seven Vietnamese fishermen are now detained while their case for illegal poaching is being heard at the Basco Regional Trial Court.
Incidentally, Millo added, the poaching case of the Vietnamese fishermen is the only court case being heard in Batanes, with no cases reported at the other courts in the province, which can only be reached by plane or sea transport. – Charlie Lagasca