EDITORIAL - Citom is color blind

Life is not perfect. And law enforcement, as an aspect of life in its civilized form, is no exception. Thus we see lapses in law enforcement from time to time. And for as long as the lapses occur only from time to time, they are tolerable as expected imperfections.

But when the lapses become the norm, hounding us day to day without letup, then we begin to be irritated. We begin to be acutely aware of our expectations, and how they have been consistently failed, even by standards lowered by acknowledged imperfections.

Take the case of the Citom, the traffic arm of the city. Hearing Citom officials and enforcers launch into self-serving discourse, it is as if they were born with traffic laws for umbilical cords. But that is all talk.

In reality, the Citom is not beyond a few shenanigans of its own. For if it is as straight as it claims to be about rules, how come it tolerates that monstrosity of a traffic situation at Roa and Avila streets which bound two sides of Cebu Doctors University Hospital?

Please do not tell us the Citom is not aware of the blatant double-parking occuring every single daylight minute on these streets because the city is too small for these two streets to escape the attention of enforcers.

Yet, even the private towing contractor of Citom seems blissfully unaware of what goes on in these two streets, an unawareness made uncanny because of consistency. The consistency of unawareness remarkably matches the consistency of the double-parking spree going on there.

There are "No Parking Anytime" and "Tow Away Zone" signs all over the place but Citom appears to lose track of them when it comes to this particular area. Citom is therefore only good in paying lip service to enforcement but is actually selective and therefore abusive.

 Again, we can tolerate the imperfections of life, but when these imperfections are deliberate, such as consciously going blind to the glaring traffic violations on Roa and Avila streets, then we can only surmise on the blinding reasons, which could be in a thousand colors.