We beg to differ.
I recall two movie franchises I enjoyed in my youth, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, and Charles Bronson’s Death Wish. At the time these films were released, major cities in the United States were in the grips of a vast crime wave. Americans living in big cities lived in fear of the stereotypical armed mugger lurking…
Read More “Why Rodrigo Duterte’s vigilante justice strongly appeals to Filipinos” »
Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte has been making the news in both national and international papers lately due to his controversial statements about the notorious Davao Death Squad. In an interview with a local television program, he admitted that there is truth to the rumor linking him to the vigilante group. He even warned that…
Read More “Duterte’s iron-fisted leadership is popular with crime-weary Filipinos” »
What is it about vigilantism that appeals so much to Filipinos? The thought of taking the law into one’s hands is a common Filipino fantasy. Philippine cinema reflects this as have many recent public explosions of uncontrolled often violent rage coming from ordinary Filipinos, many of which were captured in videos that went viral over…
It has been quite some time now that the prevailing issues, hot topics and shocking headlines of our newspapers and the dominant talk of the town is the apparent and seeming rise of criminal statistics and the rampant commission of various crimes, specifically those of economic in nature and background. The root causes of crime…
The longer I write about Philippine society and its politics, the more convinced I get that the country’s state of law and order is a joke. Take Davao City for instance. All this time I thought that the city was a model for what following the “rule of law” could do. It turns out, to…