Police visibility has long gone invisible

In the spate of crimes hounding the three Metro Cebu cities with dangerous frequency and impunity, the oft-repeated clamor for police visibility has still fallen on deaf ears.

Whether coincidental or not, after IBP prexy Atty. Alex Tolentino had hinted who the vigilantes and their mastermind(s) are, came an uncanny lull of "salvagings", except for two on the 20th. The lull has also bred the resurrection of killings, robberies, snatchings, PUJ/taxicab hold-ups. It's thus no surprise that ordinary citizens favor vigilantism.

And yet, the PNP regional director insists that there's no crime upsurge and, the situation not alarming. What about the crime solution efficiency, isn't it alarmingly low?

Time was when Cebu City's Finest were few, and the population also less dense, but almost every street corner had a regular policeman on the beat. Police visibility was a given, such that, criminal elements had second thoughts before breaking the law. The flatfoot cops manning their beat also doubled as traffic enforcers, and held sway in their regular beats.

But now... There are many more cops in Metro Cebu cities to serve, supposedly, the growing population and deter the commission of crimes. The irony is that for sometime now, one could hardly find a single policeman doing his rounds. Not only an eclipse of police visibility, but a total gloom of police invisibility; thus, the joke, the invisible policemen.

Peace officers are not ordinary personnel with eight to five routine. It's frustrating that with police sub-stations saturating all over Metro Cebu areas, criminality has worsened. Could this be the excuse for top-heavy office pen-pushers and desk-bound, instead of fielding them by shifts? There's this cruel dig that they are "pulis sa kalinaw".

Don't count the cops riding in police cars shooing pedestrians and motorists with their sirens, or in rare occasions as escorts, or manning checkpoints, or the police recruits from outside Cebu prematurely posted here for the "dreaded" ASEAN Summit.

The perennial lack of police visibility issue has resurfaced in the wake of the killing of Branch Manager Narciso Alivio Damole of Allied Bank Mandaue branch, obviously robbed and killed as he stopped to change a flat tire along the reclamation area. Mandaue PNP S/Supt. Eduardo Catabas, Jr. lied through his teeth in saying that there were PNP elements along the Mandaue-Cebu City isolated reclamation area, with two at every junction pa gyud. Regular motorists plying this route can all belie such claim, unless his cops were gifted with the "invisible man's" power to stay unseen.

Realizing perhaps that no policemen covered the route until ten o'clock that evening as he initially bragged, Catabas has resorted to the SOP reactive knee jerk - as in, only responding after the incident - to have this "police invisibility" investigated. Too useless and too late, as far as the poor victim and his bereaved family are concerned, obviously the scion of former COA regional director Cesar Damole of Consolacion town who was once one's bright student in Law class.

Mark this well, that when the furor over crimes shall have died down, if it would, the PNP promise repeatedly made, to provide police visibility in crime-prone areas shall be again more honored in the breach than in the observance. This has been a cyclical canard in police work that goes with the system. How tragic to the citizenry who are hapless victims!

Catabas' posthaste promise to place 25 police outposts - an overkill in numbers, no doubt - along that isolated reclamation stretch is hardly consoling. Besides, with outposts set up, the assigned cops are prone to stay put and posted in the outposts when what is needed is police visibility, meaning actual patrolling of the entire stretch, especially from dusk to dawn.