THE rash of assassinations of public officials this year is enough to make people wonder if our law enforcement and justice agencies, namely, the Department of Justice and the Philippine National Police, National Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Jail and Management, Philippine Drug Agency authority, etc. are losing the battle against the criminal world.

Easily, the man on the street dares to speculate (with authority) that the reason hitmen and masterminds are rarely identified and arrested is because these are the corrupt and dismissed trained personnel of the PNP and the Armed Forces, protected by their own superiors, or privileged inmates serving life sentence for murder, utilized by prison officials as guns-for-hire to the wealthy and powerful involved in illegal drugs trading and illegal gambling.

Worse, our man on the street attributes the growing influence of the corrupt and mighty in government to the failure of the system to make them accountable.

Unfortunately, these are all perceptions that do not help the worsening situation.

But these is one reality that has not been addressed by the government. Hitmen ride motorcycles and the law requires them to wear helmets. This has made efforts to identify hitmen more difficult with the growing acceptance of seeing motorcycle riders wearing helmets that completely cover faces enabling them to disappear in a crowd instantly.

With hitmen riding in tandem, aided by hidden faces, our law enforcement agents will almost always be facing a blank wall in pursuing suspects.

Our legislators can help curb the assassination trend by amending the helmet law – to ban helmets that cover their faces with tinted glass, and to require all motorcycles to have their plates installed on top of their headlamps.

It is to their primary interests that they amend the law quickly because the next victims can be them, and their assassins and masterminds will never be known.

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