ALMOST overnight, the crazies have come out of the woodwork.
In Cebu City, the incoming mayor Tomas Osmeña says he will pay police a bounty of P50,000 for every criminal they kill, and P5,000 for every one they wound.
“If you kill a criminal in the line of duty, [you’ll be rewarded], no questions asked. I’m there to assist the police, not to prosecute them,” Osmeña said last week.
“That is my purpose: to instill fear in the criminals. If they want to commit crimes, they get into war with me. I will see to it that they will be casualties.”
Asked if such rewards might encourage vigilante killings, Osmeña said: “I’m not going to suppress vigilantes.”
The newly elected mayor has been down this road before.
During his previous stint as Cebu mayor, Osmeña told police: “Go ahead, pull the trigger. As mayor, my warning to anybody doing a crime is I will see to it that you’ll be dead on the spot. If we catch you, you will be so sorry—you won’t be around.”
Not to be outdone, Mayor Antonio Halili of Tanauan City in Batangas this week forced 11 suspected drug pushers to parade through town in a mock version of the religious “Flores de Mayo” procession wearing T-shirts saying “I’m a pusher. Don’t be like me.”
The mayor, who calls his latest innovation the “Flores de Pusher,” has paraded rapists and thieves before in a similar fashion, saying these walks of shame will deter crime.
Both mayors seem to be attuned to the political currents that gave a landslide victory to Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, who ran for president on a hardline law-and-order platform to kill thousands of criminals and to eradicate crime in his first six months in office.
But even Duterte, who is a lawyer, recognizes the tiny flaw in Halili’s anti-crime campaign—it’s illegal.
Specifically, the Anti-Torture Act of 2009 states that it is a form of mental torture to inflict shame upon a person by parading him or her in public places.
“I am a lawyer, and I know that we are not supposed to do that,” said Duterte, who has been linked to the notorious Davao death squad, a vigilante group that was said to have summarily executed more than 1,000 suspected criminals between 1998 and 2008.
His advice to the Tanauan mayor: “Because I’m mad at drug dealers, maybe I won’t bother to parade you; I’ll just kill you.”
That the incoming president and the Cebu mayor offer de facto support for summary executions and that the Tanauan mayor uses mental torture on persons who have not yet even been convicted of any crime is frightening enough. What is even more frightening is that so many of their constituents are willing to overlook the blatant violation of the basic human rights to life and dignity and the presumption of innocence, forgetting that they too may forfeit these rights one day to a trigger-happy policeman—or a gun-toting mayor.
It is those among us who watch these rights being violated and say nothing who deserve to do the walk of shame.