The criminal mind (1)

The Asian Criminological Society (ASC), which invited this Contrarian to a side event, not as a college of criminology instructor on police reporting but as a member of the press, held this week a three-day conference on the evolving nature of crime: The emphasis being on transnational crimes and the difficulty of prosecuting them because of simple cross-border jurisdictional issues and, at times, the technological firewalls used by so-called white-collar criminals to hide their tracks.

This year’s breakout sessions, co-presented by the Philippine College of Criminology (PCCR), gathered at the Midas Hotel in Pasay City top criminologists from around the world, with participants drawing lessons from one another as crimes present justice, as well as law and order, challenges that are oftentimes unique to each country.

We are assuming the ASC has a special interest when it comes to the Philippines, thus this latest local engagement following a 2019 initial conference held in Cebu. At least one member of the media, who attended the discussions, posited to the resource persons that crime statistics in the Philippines (like the purported 60-percent drop in crime volume early in the Marcos administration) are oftentimes doubted by the general public. And with reason.

From the big crowd we had seen at the hotel ballroom where the main speakers were delivering their talks on such matters as cybercrime and criminal profiling, etc., followup ASC conferences in the Philippines may be in the offing if only to see if the country was able to go beyond traditional and outdated criminology perceptions, government policies and laws dealing with law and public order violations, and national security breaches.

The sense we have gotten from the top resource persons is that many provisions of the Revised Penal Code may no longer be relevant, having been rendered obsolete by the changing times, and that even the new laws being passed to combat criminals and syndicates are not aligned with the best crime prevention and solution practices we are seeing in other countries.

A common notion we have gathered is that the country’s efforts to deal with evolving crime methodologies and the application of new technologies to process crime scenes, as well as how government can catch up with and apprehend tech-savvy criminals, would be best served if our lawmakers would seek the expertise of the best criminologists when crafting penal laws. Law enforcement agencies too should have professional criminologists (those with expertise going beyond the baccalaureate level) working for them.

As I write this, at the back of my mind is the heart-rending narrative of a DAILY TRIBUNE officemate whose family is crying out for justice over the fatal stabbing last week of a loved one by a 15-year-old suspect in what an initial police investigation determined to be a crime motivated by jealousy.

The police charge sheet was for a homicide (probably thinking it was a spur-of-the-moment act of violence), but this was upgraded to murder by the prosecutor (maybe because there was supposedly an initial altercation or threat made before the suspect, a minor, came back to waylay his victim as the latter was coming off work). Such a tragedy; truly it is.

Gathered together in a media discussion on day one of the conference were ASC president Prof. Ramasubbu Thilagaraj; Dr. Kim Binta, professor at Sam Houston State University; University of Cambridge professor Dr. Friedrich Losel; Prof. Jianhing Liu, director of the Center for Empirical Studies; Dr. Gerry Cano, president of the Professional Criminologists Association of the Philippines; Atty. Ramil Gabao, PhD, MNSA, and chairman of the Criminology Professional Regulatory Board; and PCCR president Ms. Ma. Angelica Lei Bautista.

To know the mind of the criminal, we’ll try to pick the minds of these resources persons who have years if not decades of expertise in deciphering what lurks in the dark recesses of the thoughts and motivations of the descendants of the murderous biblical Cain and Joseph’s conspiratorial siblings.

(To be continued)