Two people are dead and four others are wounded after a shooting on a basketball court in Parañaque, near a condominium where the suspect himself lived.

So far nothing unusual in the grim litany of an urban crime, except for one small detail that this Contrarian wants to put front and center.

It’s the fact that the alleged gunman had already been convicted of homicide in 2023 and that there is a standing warrant for his arrest issued by a Taguig City court on 16 June 2023.

In other words, the man who allegedly opened fire at Azure had already been judged guilty once before. The law had spoken and the court had issued its order to clap him behind bars pronto.

Yet the killer still walked around freely, said to have knocked on doors at the condominium weeks before the shooting, apparently looking for someone he had quarreled with.

This makes us wonder what exactly a warrant of arrest means these days. Is it a document that merely circulates among police and other law enforcement offices until someone remembers to act on it?

An order for pizza is way better because if it’s delayed and it arrives cold on your doorstep, it’s free, even if the poor delivery rider ultimately gets to pay for it, deducted from his salary.

The police now say they have launched a manhunt — after the damage was done, after he was able to pick up a gun and pick out his victims through his crosshairs like ducks in a shooting gallery.

That’s kind of curious since the man should have been hunted down two years ago. There’s hardly forensic science in this, but rather a question of routine police work — the dull, unglamorous business of actually serving warrants issued by courts.

Now along comes a rather convenient press release from the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) announcing that it had arrested 1,009 suspects nationwide in February.

The figure came complete with impressive statistics: 873 operations, P851 million worth of seized evidence, hundreds of firearms and explosives confiscated.

On paper, it is a spectacular accomplishment. The press release reads like a scoreboard. Numbers stacked on numbers. Arrests counted like baseball runs. One thousand and nine suspects.

But the problem with statistics is that they sometimes conceal what they are meant to reveal. Because somewhere inside those numbers is a simple and embarrassing fact: a convicted homicide offender with an active warrant was apparently free long enough to shoot two people dead in Parañaque.

You can arrest a thousand suspects and still miss the one who matters.

Crime statistics are comforting things. They create the impression of control. They suggest a machine humming efficiently in the background — warrants served, criminals caught, order restored.

Until something like Azure happens and the machine suddenly looks less impressive. The truth is that law enforcement is not measured by how many suspects appear in a monthly report. It is measured by whether the people who should be in custody are actually in custody.

A warrant of arrest is supposed to end a man’s freedom. In this case, it didn’t. Instead, two people are dead and four others have sustained life-changing injuries.

And somewhere in a press office, someone thought the appropriate response was to circulate a document celebrating 1,009 arrests. Statistics can be very persuasive. They just don’t bring the dead back.