Silence means capitulation
What the speech did not do, in any sustained way, was treat crime and drugs as a critical problem requiring a national answer.
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What the speech did not do, in any sustained way, was treat crime and drugs as a critical problem requiring a national answer.
Why the deafening silence on crime and illegal drugs when sinister elements once again dominate the streets, particularly at night? Why the apparent surrender to a scourge that many Filipinos believed had been eradicated once and for all?
President Marcos delivered his fifth State of the Nation Address (SoNA) and spoke of flood control accountability, of pending corruption cases, of a rebuke to China, and even of ending system loss charges.
He honored, by name, the three Tacloban schoolchildren shot dead on 22 June, a gesture the victims’ mothers received with gratitude tempered by frustration. What the speech did not do, in any sustained way, was treat crime and drugs as a critical problem requiring a national answer.
Pulse Asia’s July survey, fielded the same week as the SoNA, had criminality up to fourth among the urgent national concerns at 22 percent, and illegal drugs fifth at 19 percent.
In March, criminality sat at 17 percent, well behind jobs creation. By July it had overtaken jobs entirely, which slid from a tie for fourth down to seventh at 15 percent.
What this means is that respondents are now more afraid of getting robbed or shot than they are of being unemployed, a situation that should have been worth at least a paragraph in the SoNA.
The PNP points to a 25.77-percent drop in focus crimes this past May, the lowest monthly count of the year, and a nearly 16-percent decline across eight major crime categories that contradicts the welling fear among Filipinos.
The level of distress is measured in whether a man can drive a motorcycle taxi at 3 a.m. without being knifed for it.
Fabio Norberte Jr., a transport rider, was stabbed by a passenger in Caloocan on 14 July and died of his wounds, one of at least two such incidents that same week. When gig workers plan their evenings around the risk of being murdered for a phone and a motorcycle, it is clearly a governance failure.
Hoodlums are growing bolder. Recently, diners at an upscale restaurant right in Makati were robbed of their watches and wallets. Strangely, the police, obsessed with maintaining manicured peace and order statistics, said it had no record of it.
The huge disparity between the Philippine National Police’s sunny statistics and the population’s increasing discomfort on the streets reflects the loss of trust in those in authority to keep the peace and order.
The drug side of the degenerating social order tells a similar story.
Since former President Rodrigo Duterte was flown to The Hague in March 2025 to face the International Criminal Court, the metric of success of the drug war has quietly changed.
The Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency has lately been busy, logging a single week in May with P604 million in drugs taken off the market nationwide. These are the busts that get press releases, but container-load quantities of methamphetamine or shabu still find their way into the country years after a campaign that killed thousands was supposed to have choked off supply.
It was Duterte who warned that the proliferation of drugs is parallel to the brutality of the crimes committed.
Malacañang’s bandwidth is consumed by political intramurals because it is ultimately about power.
Crime, by contrast, commands little attention within the Palace circle because it exacts no political cost from those in power, even as ordinary Filipinos — commuters, diners, workers and schoolchildren — bear the consequences.
The President’s SoNA lasted more than 80 minutes, yet not one meaningful second was devoted to a problem millions of Filipinos had expected to hear addressed.
The omission spoke as loudly as any line that made it into the speech.
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