Another boo-boo

Another day, another boo-boo. Where’s the taray girl when we need her? President Arroyo should throw one of her famous tantrums in public and fire someone on sight after the latest embarrassment in her "all-out war" on criminality.

A tearful bank cashier faced the press yesterday to deny that she was a principal suspect in a multimillion-peso tax diversion scam. Acsa Ramirez turned out to be the whistle blower in the tax scam at the Land Bank of the Philippines. She was giving additional information to the National Bureau of Investigation when she was summoned by President Arroyo last week.

Ramirez must have been excited, thinking she would get a presidential commendation. Instead she was treated as a suspect, and that was how she was presented on TV.

No one dared correct the President, who just recently fired some low-ranking factotum for a similar boo-boo. Now Ramirez herself has come out and exposed the blunder.

The NBI clarified yesterday that the President did not categorically identify Ramirez as a suspect. But the damage has been done.

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This should teach the President to be extra cautious when dealing with our law enforcement agencies. In their eagerness to produce results, as ordered by the Chief Executive, police and NBI officials could trot out the wrong people for public condemnation.

They could manufacture achievement reports and crime statistics. Under pressure to solve a sensational case, they could – and this has happened too many times in the past – plant evidence or frame up people.

The result is that cases are dismissed by the courts, the innocent are wrongly punished and the real culprits remain free to continue their depredations.

So far most of the suspected kidnappers, muggers and carjackers presented to the public by a gleeful President have been identified by their victims. That minimizes the chance that the wrong people have been caught and, worse, paraded as criminals on prime time news.

But the fiasco over Acsa Ramirez should teach the President a lesson in prudence. In the first place, her lawmen are not famous for honest-to-goodness sleuthing. Some of the biggest criminal cases remain unsolved. If they can’t catch the right suspects, they can easily revert to form and round up some poor sap, pour water laced with chili into his nose and threaten to do it again if he doesn’t own up to a string of pickpocketing cases and behave in front of the President of the Philippines. Believe me, when they’re done with the poor sap, he’ll be ready to own up to the murder of Jose Rizal.

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As I’ve said, people have gotten the message. We want tough action on crime, and we can see that the President is delivering — or at least trying to deliver. We like having even two-bit hoods rounded up. We want quiet neighborhoods free of kidnappers, burglars, side mirror thieves and Ecstasy-popping, shabu-sniffing punks. Outside our home we don’t like worrying about our cell phones getting snatched, our cars getting stolen, our lunches in restaurants being disrupted by robbers.

In these dangerous times, many Filipinos prefer the mailed-fist approach to criminality. They shrug when suspected kidnappers are mowed down in purported shootouts with lawmen. They applaud when a man arrested for raping a young girl is shot dead after trying — in his handcuffs — to grab a policeman’s gun. If detained crooks are shot purportedly while trying to escape, people murmur good riddance.

There is only so much that the President can do, however, to drive home the message that her administration is hell-bent on restoring peace and order from Batanes to Sulu. Those photo sessions, with the suspects lined up as if for a firing squad, are getting boring.

When she’s done with the photo sessions, the President should impress upon her top lawmen that their jobs are on the line. All recent surveys have shown that criminality is a principal concern of practically all sectors. Let’s wait for the next survey — an independent one by a reputable pollster, not some unscientific survey by a biased group — and see if her campaign has made a difference. If people are starting to feel safer, it will show.

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If the President still wants the photo sessions, she can reserve them for the major cases, where suspects have been identified by their victims, or where the suspects are cops, soldiers or public officials.

We’re also for her war on corrupt members of the judiciary. Those temporary restraining orders have become a major source of graft among judges and justices, and the TROs are discouraging investments.

The President, however, should be careful when posing with people she commends in her campaign against lawlessness. Some of the persons seen grinning with her in her photo sessions are themselves notorious for corruption.

Such incidents, along with slip-ups like the one involving Acsa Ramirez, could quickly erode whatever gains the President makes in her high-profile campaign to break the back of criminality.

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HIGHWAY ROBBERY BOARD: I’ve just learned that the office holding up the reopening of Kabihasnan Road, the short cut to Coastal Road in Parañaque, is the Toll Regulatory Board. The TRB is the protector of the highway robbers running the South Luzon Tollway and North Luzon Expressway. TRB director Jaime Dumlao has reportedly agreed "in principle" to reopen Kabihasnan Road. In this country, that could mean another year of waiting for harried motorists.

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MUSLIMS IN SWEDEN: I know there are around 1.2 billion Muslims around the world, but I didn’t know Islam has become the second largest religion in Sweden, next to the local Lutheran Church. Swedish Ambassador Ulf Håkansson has sent me a copy of Yalla! – a book distributed by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of a campaign against religious discrimination and ignorance. The book, translated in English and Arabic, provides interesting insights on cultural interaction – how Muslims are faring in Sweden in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.