CEBU CITY, Philippines— Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) Director Englebert Soriano said crimes in Cebu City went down by 50 percent in the past two weeks.
Aside from the visibility of the uniformed personnels in the city streets, Soriano believes one of the strongest factors in the downtrend of focused crimes in the city is the implementation of the curfew since Cebu City was placed under community quarantine on March 15, 2020 due to the threat of the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).
“Our usual top three crimes which are physical injury, theft and robbery for the past two weeks, we’ve recorded a decline of about 50 percent,” said Soriano.
“Malaking factor yung maagang umuuwi ang mga tao at maagang nagsasara ang mga business operations,” he added.
(It’s a huge factor that people go home early and business operations also close early.)
The eight focused crimes are murder, homicide, physical injury, rape, robbery, theft, motorcycle carnapping, and vehicle carnappning.
Soriano stated that this week, they have not gotten any reports of carnapping of motorcycles yet.
“Last week kasi may tatlo tayong carnapping nga motorcycle. Ngayon, nawala. Zero talaga siya,” he added.
(Last week, we had three motorcycle carnapping incidents. Now, there’s none. It’s really zero.)
Soriano said the drop started since the declaration of President Rodrigo Duterte of the state of public health emergency (Presidential Proclamation No. 922) last March 8.
Since that time, they have only recorded 13 theft cases compared to the 20 that was recorded since March 2.
“Malaking binaba talaga,” he said. “Pwde ba nating sabihin na natakot din yung mga mandarambong [sa virus]?”
(It’s really a big drop. Can we say even the criminals are afraid?)
But Soriano believes heightened police visibility also plays a huge part in this development.
“Malaking factor din na gumagalaw sa barangay level,” said Soriano.
(It’s also a factor that it is happening in the barangay level.)
Soriano hopes that the trend continues in the coming days.
“We’ll see in the coming week kung tuloy tuloy yung downtrend nitong eight focused crimes natin,” said Soriano.
(Let’s see in the coming week if the downtrend of these eight focused crimes will continue.) /bmjo