MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza Prices of everything from fuel to fish, eggs to chicken going up. The list of shortages grows longer. Guess what’s coming down? If you believe the cops, crime has gone down by 36 percent. This despite the daily reports of brutal assaults against girls, women, and grandmothers, including crimes without a clear motive, others apparently the after-effects of some  hallucinatory drug. The police may have the data, but we have the feeling that not all is hunky-dory on the crime-fighting front. Don’t blame the law enforcers, blame the lawless. But after three years of living with a killer virus and a million deaths later – and how many human lives upended – have we scratched the surface of covid’s impact on the mind and soul? Penniless, jobless, aimless, perhaps godless, the desperate ones explode in a rage of violence, or they shut down and implode, harming themselves and those nearest and most easily available. The horror story of the day was told by television, about an 84-year-old grandmother who was burned alive by her own children and grandchildren while they watched, as instructed by their cult leader. In another bizarre incident, a man was arrested after he allegedly raped the corpse of a 63-year-old woman. Don’t blame the enforcers, policemen are also victims, as what happened a few days ago to five cops when they were ambushed in Ampatuan in their van, one of those jeeps open on all sides plus rear, making them perfect sitting ducks. The police chief and one of his men were killed, the three others wounded. It’s a crime to issue those types of vehicles to lawmen, might as well offer them for target practice to drug lords and their minions. “To serve and protect” a community that does not value their safety when they go on a mission to hunt down killers, arsonists, kidnappers, notorious criminals and gangsters – policemen are not suicide material, yet we treat them like robots or dummies who do not bleed, feel pain. In Ampatuan, Maguindanao, or Metro Manila, in a “highly urbanized city” or a deceptively quiet village out in the boondocks, danger lurks. If a uniform and gun are not enough deterrent, imagine an invitingly open-on-all-sides van. Let’s not tally more crimes against police patrols.