#AnimatED: Impunity in NAIA

The apparent surge of travelers in the past few months “found” with bullets in their luggage only to be victims of extortion has cast another black eye on NAIA, already sagging in its reputation as one of Asia’s worst airports.

Reports about this scam have traveled fast, far and wide through news and social media. Yet this has not deterred the perpetrators.

What is enraging is that the crime – planting bullets in unsuspecting passengers’ luggage – happens in the window to our country. This says much about the extent of impunity here: when a visitor or resident arrives and leaves, he or she is chased by this unsettling reality.

The law is loose, the system doesn’t go after criminals, and is not reassuring to hapless victims.

Here’s the surprising thing: this has been happening for 3 years. But law-enforcement authorities have not put a stop to it.

In 2012, a “BritPaul Northants” from the UK posted in Trip Advisor that a “security agent”  tried to extort $1,000 from his daughter who was leaving the country after a holiday. A “bullet casing” was supposedly found in her luggage.

This was not an isolated case. Data from the Office for Transportation Security show that, in 2012 alone, there were 1,214 incidents of “ammunition interception” in various airports. It is unclear, however, how many of these involved extortion.

This rose in 2013 (2,184) and slightly decreased in 2014 (1,813). So far this year, 1,394  such incidents have been recorded. Most of these took place in Terminal 3 of NAIA.

A retired law enforcement officer in the US, who learned about it through Twitter, has detailed a few steps to deal with this nefarious scheme. The crime can be solved by technology and simple protocols. Are these so hard to do? (READ: IMHO on laglag-bala)

The bullet scam, really, is symptomatic of a larger problem: weak rule of law in the country, where people are not protected from injustices.

In the 2015 World Justice Project which ranks countries in terms of rule of law, the Philippines placed 51 among 102 countries. While this shows an improvement from 2014, when we placed 60, the series of “tanim-bala” incidents remind us that a lot more has to be done to fix the system. 

We can’t resist saying this: there is no silver bullet. The measures to strengthen rule of law range from rigorous enforcement to an efficient and fair justice system. – Rappler.com