MEDIUM RARE

That’s how a certain type of policeman behaves, when his badge and uniform are not enough to “serve and protect” the people. Trigger-happy cops, tragic consequences for others.

Each time a cop shoots an innocent victim, their elders in the PNP downgrade it as an isolated incident, as if the victim were a mere statistic. Each time something like the “mistaken identity” shooting death of 17-year-old Jemboy Baltazar of Navotas makes the headlines, there’s a hue and cry to review police procedures and policies, to train and retrain rookies and oldies not just how to shoot but why and why not.

Admittedly, police work can be more stressful than an ordinary laborer’s eight-hour occupation, but to shoot a young man who has just dived into the river, without a gun, goes beyond the pale of psychology. What was the shooter thinking? The cop did not even bother to confront Jemboy and ask him the usual questions – name, age, address. Was it because he was under stress (from some cause other than Jemboy’s being at the wrong place, wrong time)? Was he so eager to use his gun that he had forgotten to replace the dead batteries in his body-cam?

Maybe the copper has been watching too many cop movies, American-style, where policemen and detectives wear their guns even when they’re in the police station. (America’s population of 330 million own 400 million guns.) Of a markedly different style, British cops are unarmed when they’re out on a mission. When they’re in a situation that they consider risky, the rule is to call for backup, i.e., a unit of trained shooters who respond not with guns blazing but with the cool of an agent of the law who sees no need to shed blood unnecessarily. At home, as we saw during the iron-fisted administration of the tough-talking Rodrigo Duterte, cops were told to shoot in self-defense, “shoot when your life is in danger.”

A boy unarmed, unknown to the shooter, killed by a policeman trained to protect civilians from danger, a policeman who could not tell the difference between shooting for the sake of shooting and shooting in self-defense.