It’s good to hear that the City is waging an intensified campaign against drug abuse as an indirect way of solving and hopefully minimizing the killings in the City. Mayor Manuel Sagarbarria made the announcement after the police theorized that the killings are a result of in-fighting among drug dealers.
To show its seriousness in the campaign against drugs, the City distributed cellular phones to barangay tanods (village watchmen) to equip them with the means of reporting suspicious elements in their neighborhoods. The Market Task Force has also been merged with the Task Force SAGARR to put more warm bodies in the City’s auxiliary law-enforcing arm.
Twenty new policemen have been added to the City’s undermanned police force. Ideally, we should have one policeman for every 500 residents but what we have now is something like one cop for every 1,800 people in Dumaguete.
Now, what do we do and how do we do it? According to an article written by David R. Francis in The National Bureau of Economic Research in the US, the City of New York decreased its violent crime rate by more than 56 percent and its property crime rate by about 65 percent–twice more than the drop in the national crime rate–by focusing on little things.
New York’s program of aggressive policing of lower-level crimes, dubbed as the “broken windows” approach to law enforcement, has been credited for the dramatic drop in crime. The “Broken Windows” theory suggests that small disorders lead to larger ones and perhaps even to crime.
As then New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani said, “Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”
The challenge to our law enforcers, therefore, is to make our City clean and orderly. Let’s clear our sidewalks of ambulant vendors and beggars, put more order in our streets by going after traffic violators, paint walls to erase graffiti and arrest people who throw their garbage in the streets or who burn their garbage. Little things make a big difference. And the list of small things goes on and on.
So we wish our law enforcers well as they embrace this big mission, even as we hope that by enforcing our laws, they would not end up as hypocrites by breaking them. The police jeep, for example, has only one functioning headlight and has no tail lights whatsoever. It also seems none of our traffic aides who drive motorcycles wear helmets. They should not be beyond the laws they enforce.
We also ask our readers to be the citizens you wish the other Dumaguetenos would be — obey traffic rules, don’t break the line, wait for your turn, don’t litter and lastly, BE ON TIME.
Making Dumaguete a real City of Gentle People is not just the job of our local officials or our law enforcers. We all have a role to play.
