EDITORIAL — Vigilantes and the Sparrow Unit

Law enforcement agencies tasked to keep peace and order and punish criminals, and even the agencies tasked to monitor and impose sanctions on erring civil servants should put their acts together before more and more people put the law into their hands.

First, it was a group of so-called vigilantes slaying criminal after criminal who manage to elude arrest or stay out of jail. Now, here comes the Sparrow Unit of the New People's Army, who, according to an intelligence report received by the police, are reportedly out to go after corrupt government officials, allies of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and scalawags in the police force.

These incidences of people taking the law into their hands should alarm law enforcement agencies and even the supposed watchdogs of civil servants. This is a clear sign that those who erred in the eyes of the law and those in government who are using their posts for personal gain are not being punished for the wrong that they have done. Justice, whether criminal or administrative, in this country is just plain elusive!

Vigilante-type of killings came about because criminality became so uncontrollable. The incidence of robberies, snatchings and even killings happened almost everyday and in plain view of the public. The police could just not attend to each and every crime and solve it. And, to make things worse, even the criminals who are already languishing in jail, manage to escape because of the sorry state of our prisons!

We are not supporting these so-called vigilantes. But we can't blame them too. There must be something wrong with our law enforcement system that led them to take action on their own. They must have realized that some people in authority are not doing their jobs, that's why criminals remain free or eventually gain freedom.

It is also in this same way that we cannot blame the NPA's Sparrow Unit if the reports are true that they are going after corrupt government officials and scalawags in the police force. These government officials and policemen have long been a problem and, although we have heard promises that these people will be punished, we have yet to really see action.

Which is why the government should shape up its law enforcement before more and more groups lose their faith in the law and start taking the law into their hands like the so-called vigilantes and, if reports are true, the NPA Sparrow Unit.