Policemen on night patrol in a Manila street: A community-oriented policing program has been tried, but the program was sidelined when a new set of officials took over the top echelons of the police.

SINCE THEN, anti-crime groups have dissected kidnap-for-ransom cases and broke down the criminal justice system into what we have taken to calling its "pillars." Although our observations are not meant to denigrate the entire system or be taken as sweeping generalizations, they are glimpses of what we have been up against all these years and what we may still be facing a decade from now. We take hope in the fact that in each pillar, we have found many committed and dedicated public servants who work hard even under the most adverse conditions. State prosecutors and police officers who have been working with us often work through the night and into the early morning hours to do their jobs the best they possibly can. But there are too few of their kind and their efforts have not been enough to overcome the system's weaknesses and shortcomings.

Pillar 1: law enforcement. The Philippine National Police lacks manpower and resources to go after criminal gangs, many of which were and still are well-organized, well-funded and well-protected. Early on, there was even ample proof that police officials, some of them high-ranking, were involved in the kidnappings. Some things apparently do not change; arrests made during the past two years have proven that again, some military and police officials, albeit lower ranking, have been involved in kidnappings.

Now criminal gangs have become more technically sophisticated and better equipped. In comparison, the PNP remains in dire need of structural reforms, beginning from the way it hires, promotes, and assigns its members. Its ranks need to be cleansed of scalawags, its budget streamlined and reconstructed in such a way that the money is able to trickle down to the lowest precinct, and its bureaucracy trimmed so that more policemen would be out in the streets and protecting the innocent rather than having many of them sitting inside the headquarters.

Without these taking place, even the most well-thought-out initiatives against crime may fail. Take the case of the Community Oriented Policing program, which had worked well in other countries, that the CAAC and MRPO helped push locally. With financial assistance from the Zonta Club of Ayala-Makati, professional trainor Rose Yenko painstakingly worked with police officers to draw up an entire module and training manual on how to implement it. But that was as far as it got. Because the police force then and now is still largely dependent on personalities, the program was sidelined instead of institutionalized after National Capital Region chief of command General Jewel Canson was reassigned.

Pillar 2: the prosecution. Even when the national police do succeed in arresting the right perpetrators, the overworked, underpaid, and unmotivated fiscals still have a hard time prosecuting the case. Of course there are many instances when haphazard police work is at fault. Just as often, however, the sheer negligence and lack of diligence of the prosecutors themselves are to blame. Usually, too, the police and the prosecutors do not work in tandem, and end up pointing fingers at each other once the fiascos begin piling up.

Fingers were certainly pointing just about everywhere when police sergeants Jorge Comadre, Leo Betubio, and Policarpio Avenir were granted bail despite the fact that they had admitted to at least 15 kidnappings and bank robberies and had been positively identified by two kidnap victims. The trio was also known to belong to the kidnap-for-ransom gang headed by Police Lt. Nestor Espejo. In another case that qualifies for Ripley’s, the prosecutor himself prepared the victim’s affidavit of desistance.

The Department of Justice and the prosecution service have a crucial role in the entire judicial process. A strong, dedicated and committed justice secretary has a significant role to play in strengthening the criminal justice system and in making the fight against criminal gangs more than just a moro-moro staged to appease an increasingly worried public. But until that position is not seen as a payback for political favors, reforming the system the next 10 years will remain elusive.

Pillar 3: the corrections. Sometimes, though, the victims’ luck changes and a case is filed successfully. Unfortunately, members of kidnap-for-ransom groups, having amassed millions, can still buy their way out.

This was why one of the country’s most-wanted kidnappers Roberto Obeles Yap, for instance, was able to elude jail time despite the many cases filed against him, including the kidnapping case for which he was convicted. He had a P1-million reward on his head when he was finally killed in Angeles, Pampanga in November 2003.

Kidnappers who do get placed under detention somehow often manage to escape while their trial is going on. And once they are out on the streets again, they just go back to kidnapping, albeit in a place other than their old haunts. Kidnap suspect Job Damaso and the gang members who abducted Charlene Mayne Sy were jail escapees from Iloilo. Antonio Pelenio, an escapee from Quezon City jail, kidnapped Regan King in Cebu; Tony Tan and Benjamin Dy also broke out of the Quezon City jail in February 2003 and abducted three new victims three months after their escape.