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Metro-Cebu is gearing up for the Asean Summit this December. There’s a general sprucing up of all the Metro cities, Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-lapu. Roads are being repaved, garbage collected, traffic lights fixed, vagrants (especially the “taong-grasa”) picked up and sent to their families or the DSWD. It looks almost like election time.

One thing authorities can’t seem to control, however, is petty crime that sometimes turns into a felony when victims resist.

Take, for example, the shooting to death of a female student. Coming out of her classes at the University of Cebu in the evening, Carmela Cabanog took a public utility jeepney to go home. On the way a man jumped in and tried to snatch her bag. The student resisted. He pulled out a handgun and shot her in the chest. She was only 19 years old.

What makes this crime doubly tragic is that this student worked part-time to augment her college fees as she was born of poor farmers who had scraped, scrimped and saved to put her to college. She was their hope of a better life. She did not take this burden lightly. She sought to excel in her studies and was an honor student. In one senseless moment, that hope got snuffed out.

The irony of it all is that Metro-Cebu’s police force was beefed up with around 400 new recruits from other parts of the country. They certainly couldn’t do anything to prevent this crime. Sometimes you’d wonder even if 4,000 of them would have prevented the crime knowing how inept our police is.

Somehow you can’t help feel that all that vigilantism in Cebu is a big joke because it doesn’t seem to curtail crime.

What does this all mean? In preparing to look like a world-class city for the Asean Summit, we can do all the external cleaning up we want. But the death of that student will always be a reminder that, deep inside, we’re rotten as ever.

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