Is the vigilante God?

There was a horrible crime which American media reported recently. A young college student was found dead in her apartment somewhere in South Carolina. Stiffany Souers was her name. Her remains, already in rigor mortis, bore signs of strangulation and the criminal, per initial findings, was believed to be crude, though brutal, in his ways that he only used the top bikini of the coed to choke her to death. The killing shocked the community into fearing that even the home was no longer safe.

As police began to work, their investigators found out that nobody probably witnessed the crime. There was no one else in the apartment where Stiffany was assaulted at the estimated time of the criminal invasion. So, not a single person could volunteer any information about it.

Just the same, American police applied routine processes. Or so the report continued. Without even a description of the probable offender to work on, they started by going through the motion of gathering material pieces of evidence at the scene of the crime and plodded on. Result? In less than one week, they solved the crime and effected arrest of the suspect, a person named Jerry Inman. What was, to me, remarkable was the fact that the alleged criminal was not caught anywhere near the scene of the crime. Jerry Inman was apprehended in another state, Tennessee.

I hold no preferences for or biases against the Americans. When I mention this particular case of a commission of a heinous crime in far away South Carolina and its quick solution, I do so in the light of what is lamentably going on in our city. I can not help but compare the efficiency of the American police and the humiliating incompetence of our own.

While we read that the US policemen solved the murder of Stiffany Souers, our own community witnessed the cold-bloodied killing of one Neil Borinaga, 163rd vigilante victim. Quite unlike the case of the American student, who was reportedly strangled in her lonesome, Neil Borinaga was shot to death in the presence of many other persons. And at high noon at that! But, I am sure Borinaga's case will remain a statistic and I bet my last peso that our police will never solve it. After all, the criminal was reportedly a vigilante.

The vigilante killer may be emboldened by one of few things. First, he knows that our police force is incompetent that he can commit murder anytime of the day anywhere without being caught. This kind of thinking is not just demonstrated by the vigilante's audacity in shooting his victims in plain view of many witnesses but is backed up by the zero solution record of our police. Imagine, there have been 162 earlier unsolved murders! This is a bad situation because it promotes lawlessness.

Second, the vigilante could be a policeman and so his comrades in arms would look in the opposite direction each time he fell a defenseless civilian. With our police force helpless in the midst of an increasing crime rate, they might be entertaining the terrible idea that killing those who, at one time or another served prison term, could deter others from taking the path of the criminal. That is a worse situation because the policeman, whose function it is to protect the citizenry, has become the criminal himself.

Third, the vigilante could be a trigger happy psychotic. It may happen that he commits this senseless way inspired by or with the blessing of or upon instructions coming from our social (read it political) demigods. He finds satisfaction of his criminal cravings by claiming to have cleansed society of the perceived denizens of the underworld. This is the worst case because someone is playing God.

I find these propositions despicable. But judging from the abject failure of our police to solve any one killing perceived to be perpetrated by a vigilante, these postulates may just indeed be correct. Grrr.