EDITORIAL - Stupid Cycle

Last week, another taxi driver was killed by holduppers, the third in just three weeks. By any measure, the killings are most certainly alarming to taxi drivers. But they should be alarming as well to the authorities.

For it is clear that something drastic and quick should be done, not just because of the spike in killings against identified and specific targets but because of the motivations behind the killings.

In all of the incidents, robbery was tagged as the motive. But the police should go beyond the fact that the killings were precipitated by robberies. They must realize that more alarming than the robbery is the clear disposition of the criminals to kill for so little.

Look, a taxi driver is not like a payroll master who probably would have millions on him. How much money do you think a taxi driver, even on a particularly good day, would have -- a thousand pesos? One thousand five hundred pesos?

For God's sake that should not be enough money to kill for. On the other hand, we have seen how snatchers, probably drug-crazed, have shot and killed even innocent students for their cellphones.

The immediate question that begs to be asked is what the police is doing about the matter? A quick follow-up question to that one would be what has happened to those roving teams of policemen on board motorcycles? And how about the checkpoints?

Have they been scrapped and withdrawn? The police should realize that law and order is truly a cat and mouse game. Just because police visibility may have resulted in a reduction in crime doesn't mean it is time to make the police invisible again.

Police visibility should be a perpetual thing. There should be no let-up in sending the criminals the message that at anytime the police may just pop up from somewhere. That prospect can be a very successful deterrent to crime.

The problem with us Filipinos is that if everything seems to be working well, we tend to drop our guard down. We do not sustain and maintain. We get complacent. And the next time we know, the waiting criminals have struck again. And the whole stupid cycle begins again.