photo taken from CNN
It was quite a normal day for Manila's tourist district, when dismissed Senior Inspector Rolando Mendoza declared hostage over a tourist bus full of mostly Chinese Nationals. The stand-off started 10 am and the "police" tried to convince the hostage-taker to surrender. For many reasons we don't know and will never know, Mendoza held the tourists captive for almost 12 hours, and that 12-hour negotiation still ended up taking the lives of 8 hostages, 1 policeman and Mendoza himself.
So what went wrong?
First of all, we have all seen what a major fail our police or assault team (shame on them for taking pride being called such) have shown. They didn't seem to know what to do. They are not even stealth. Instead, they are slow and loud. They have blown their cover a lot of times and put themselves in dangerous positions because of their ignorance.
"It looked like a hostage rescue in slow motion: Police creeping up on the bus with sledgehammers and smashing first one window, then another, then trying and failing to rip open the door." - Associated Press
The police wasted 12 hours of waiting, negotiating and "planning", but the whole thing still ended up in bloodshed. The sight of his brother being taken away, could count as a reason why the hostage-taker was provoked into firing his gun and killing some of the hostages. How stupid can the police get? Weren't they able to anticipate what could happen? Sadly, seeing them make a fool out of themselves as they throw that tear gas unto the bus and realizing that they DO NOT HAVE GAS MASKS.
What about the media? Do they really think that they helped making the situation better? In some parts of it, I think they did. Updating the whole country and the world of what's happening somehow gave us hope. But at the same time, it was unethical. The blow by blow giving out of information could have endangered everyone involved in the situation.
"Aquino also said the media’s live coverage of the incident “severely hampered" the efforts to rescue the hostages, most of them Chinese tourists who were inside a bus.
“Of course with the nonstop coverage of all the media outlets—we now understand the hostage-taker was viewing the TV and listening to the radio the whole time—[the] actual movement [of responding policemen] to areas where they can effect a successful assault were severely hampered," he said.
- www.gmanews.tv/
As we watched the whole thing transpire in front of us, we have witnessed how raw and how ugly these kinds of situations can get. It's not an action movie anymore, it's real and real lives were at stake. Let us stop and think about our actions and how far the ripples of our decisions affect others.
_
