It was a chilly Tuesday night Christina Labador would rather forget.
The mother of three was waiting for a ride home from work at the corner of Taft Avenue and Edsa in Pasay City around 11 p.m. on Jan. 14 when a man suddenly appeared and grabbed her bag at knife-point.
She had just withdrawn P5,000 from a nearby automated teller machine to buy medicine for her 68-year-old father, a stroke victim.
“I was so scared and shocked that I could not even open my mouth. In a few seconds, the man ran off and disappeared from my sight,” Labador recalled of her experience, one of 633 theft and robbery cases recorded daily by the Philippine National Police during the first half of 2014.
Luckily for the 37-year-old call center agent, the felon was arrested during a follow-up police operation a few days later, although the money she lost was not recovered.
“The PNP should have more personnel patrolling the streets to guard against petty criminals [preying] on poor people like me,” she said wryly.
Nonuniformed personnel
In his 2013 State of the Nation Address, President Benigno Aquino III vowed to curb rising criminality with the hiring of additional nonuniformed personnel (NUP) to assist law enforcers in their administrative duties.
“After all, the skills and abilities of our police would be put to waste if we keep them imprisoned in the four corners of an office,” Mr. Aquino had said.
But a year later, only about 7,500 civilian employees had been hired to help out the 148,000-strong police force.
Although Interior Secretary Mar Roxas had directed the PNP to hasten the recruitment of NUP to beef up police presence in public, PNP spokesperson Chief Supt. Reuben Theodore Sindac said it would take a while for the PNP to hire additional personnel.
Bound to budget
“We cannot hire 30,000 NUP at once because we also follow the budget appropriated to us by the national government,” Sindac said, adding that the PNP was set to hire another 7,500 NUPs before the year ends.
In a previous interview, Roxas said that based on international standards, there should be at least one policeman for every 500 people. The country’s ratio at present is 1:700.
