Reforming the criminal justice system will remain an uphill battle as the public seems to have accepted crime and faulty law enforcment to be the norm. Moreover, government agencies tasked with preventing and pursuing crime seem impervious to reform.

by Teresita Ang See

	Quezon City police catch a bag snatcher: petty crime is on the rise and the police and the courts are unable to cope. [photos courtesy of Kathleen Geslani]

“AFTER CHARLENE, who’s next?” That was the slogan in the funeral protest march for kidnap-slay victim Charlene Mayne Sy in January 1993. It was supposed to be a rhetorical question posed by the anti-crime organization Movement for Restoration of Peace and Order (MRPO). But then the answer came soon enough. The procession of names of kidnap victims has yet to stop.

“We were supposed to be an ad hoc group,” says Rose Yenko, president of the Citizens Action Against Crime (CAAC). “Never had we thought that 10 long years after we organized in February 1993, we would still be around, still fulfilling a need, and much as we want to close shop, it looks like we may have to be around forever.”

Groups like the CAAC and the MRPO would rather that they had no future, that they would no longer be any reason for them to exist. Yet as time passes, it seems the reasons only increase. In 2015, therefore, it is likely that the CAAC and the MRPO would still be around, although one can always hope that at the very least, by then they would no longer have to work as hard as they do today.

Both groups had been set up in the first two months of 1993, in response to the rampage of kidnappings that began in September 1992, when the lives of teeners Kenneth Go and Myron Uy Ramos were snuffed out by their abductors. The tragedy was then the most shocking trauma visited on the Chinese-Filipino community—the abduction happened right in Binondo, the victims were young, and not only were they killed, they had been tortured, and that was even after ransom was paid to the kidnappers. The reason for the torture and murder: an active Philippine National Police (PNP) official had tried to cut into the ransom payment; the kidnappers said they had to give the official a warning to back off by sacrificing the two teenagers. The Chinoy community seethed, raged, and mourned, but at the time, it had been too intimidated to take any action.

Three months after, however, the stark image of the bloodied corpse of 15-year-old Charlene Mayne Sy lying side by side with her abductors on EDSA horrified the Chinoys so much they were finally galvanized into action. Sy had been killed by a volley of bullets from the police, who had strafed the car she and her kidnappers were riding. Then they had brought out her lifeless body, still clad in school clothes, and lay it beside her dead abductors on a major thoroughfare that was streaked with blood and motor oil.

On January 15, 1993, Chinoys staged a funeral/protest march on behalf of Charlene and all the other kidnapping victims since the Go-Ramos abduction. Bustling Binondo became silent for a day as all businesses there and Chinese-Filipino schools shut down. The move was a milestone for the erstwhile silent, docile Chinoys who had always bent with the wind. They wanted everyone to know enough was enough and that they were now ready to fight.

The protest action also served as a wakeup call to the Ramos administration, which hastily called for a national summit on peace and order at the Philippine International Convention Center. On February 16, 1993, Chinoy organizations were joined by non-Chinoy groups for a huge rally at the PICC grounds— the biggest protest assembly since the restoration of democracy in 1986.

	The Philippine National Police lacks the manpower and resources to go after criminal gangs, which are well-organized, well-funded, and well-protected.

YET TODAY, kidnapping statistics continue to make one’s blood grow cold. Except for 1999, 2000, and the fortunately dramatic improvement in 2004, kidnapping cases averaged 125 a year, or slightly more than 10 cases a month. In the past decade, 2,300 people have fallen prey to kidnappers, an average of two victims every three days. About P1.6 billion in ransom has been paid to kidnapers in the last 10 years as well, slightly more than a fourth of which was paid out in 1996 and 1997.

Some people also have the mistaken notion that with the Abu Sayyaf, Pentagon, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front terrorizing Mindanao, that that region would have the most number of kidnap victims. Not so. From 1996 to 2003, Mindanao posted 325 victims compared to 430 in the National Capital Region. At the height of the kidnapping spree in Mindanao in 1996 and 1997, the country’s capital recorded more than 70 incidents of kidnapping compared to Mindanao’s 50.

Obviously, far too many wise suggestions have gone unheeded, and far too many things have gone undone. “It needs a major overhaul to make it work,” says Teresita Baltazar, one of the founders and most active members of CAAC, says of the criminal justice system.

After that major summit at the PICC, the government had seemed eager to see that happen as well. It began reaching out to civic organizations for feedback, and by 1994, a technical committee composed of government and police officials and representatives from anti-crime groups such as Baltazar and myself was established. The committee, which was supposed to implement the action agenda of the peace and order summit, was at first a source of optimism for those of us in the anti-crime organizations. But we began to notice that the endless meetings we attended were mostly focused on the day-to-day problems of the PNP and not on reforming the system itself. In the meantime, more people were being kidnapped and banks robbed; lives, too, were being lost in the midst of the mayhem caused by these crimes.

Baltazar and I thought we had to speak up about what was going on, and for that we were rudely castigated by the director of the Philippine Police Academy during a National Police Commission (Napolcom) meeting. We retorted that no amount of PR could improve the image of the PNP—only effectiveness and hard work could. Shortly thereafter, we submitted our joint letter of resignation from the committee.

“Reforms will not work when people who are supposed to work on it regard them merely as all in a day’s work,” we wrote. “There simply was no sense of urgency to carry out reforms.”

Reforms, after all, are long term and difficult to implement. They thus need strong institutional support, which we never got or felt despite the government’s numerous promises.

Sometime in the late 1990s, however, Baltazar, under the auspices of the CAAC and the Ateneo de Manila University, took it upon herself to organize the Multisectoral Study Group for Reforms in the Criminal Justice System. The group was composed of then Justice Secretary Franklin Drilon, Army Gen. Rodolfo Biazon, businessmen Meneleo Carlos and Vicente Jayme, and CAAC and MRPO members Rose Yenko, Baltazar, and myself. We wanted to study which reforms were the most urgent and how these could be achieved. Resource persons for each topic were invited for inputs. As Carlos observed at the time, “Unless reforms are instituted, everything else that we do will just merely be band-aid solutions.”

Today working for reforms in the criminal justice system remains an uphill battle, especially since the fight is against something so well entrenched that people seem to have accepted as part of their way of life. But the multisectoral study proved to be a good start for us to look at the system in a more orderly fashion so that we could really see what was wrong— thereby making it easier for us to think of possible solutions. (Of course, seeing them implemented was another matter.)

Teresita Ang See is an academic and a cultural worker by vocation. She writes, conducts research, seminars and lectures, runs the Bahay Chinoy: Museum of the Chinese in Philippine Life, and promotes understanding and awareness of the Chinoy community and cultural heritage. By avocation, she is a fighter for justice and a peace worker.

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