Now, since it’s precisely the job of the police to hunt down criminals, why would they need orders to do so? It could only mean that before General Aglipay, the police forces have been sitting on its collective ass.

This contradicts the evidence of our eyes. In nearly every intersection, there are policemen who manage traffic; clusters of them have their eyes alerted on motorists violating the color-coding rules, jeepney drivers skirting traffic rules, while keeping a blind eye on arrogant, smoke-belching buses. It seems that they have their hands full just making traffic flow smoothly amidst the ever changing and mysterious arrangements of the Metro Manila Development Authority’s traffic management.

On the other hand, this gives the impression that criminality from petty crimes to heinous crimes has been so reduced or eliminated that policemen have been given the added function of arresting drivers using their cellphones while on the road. So many accidents have been attributed to reliance on this popular technology.

Such a touching regard for our public safety even as exasperating critics here and abroad don’t have consoling things to say about the state of peace and order in our country. What these critics obviously do not understand is that it’s more productive to arrest cellphoning drivers than to hunt down criminals, which, indeed, takes too much time and not a little amount of work and courage. This is left to the few heroic types in the police force. (May their tribe decrease, as my favorite outlaw says.)

All the same, PNP Director General Aglipay should be commended for issuing the hunt-and-arrest orders, seeing that although that’s what the PNP was created for, these orders had been frozen all along. Now the wanted public enemies are forewarned.