Police chief Manuel de Jesus Perez Sanchez is in a difficult situation. His decision to give police officers 72 hours to return vehicles unlawfully in their possession seems to have opened a can of worms and provoked the ire of the citizenry. Of the 300 vehicles in question, some 60 have been returned. These are vehicles that were reported stolen, recovered by police, but never returned to their rightful owners. TV and radio commentary focus on whether any penalty will be levied on the officers who freely employed the vehicles for their own use. “What will happen to those officers?” questions Hoy newspaper.
Moreover, there is much debate going on over whether these vehicles, many of them SUVs and luxury model cars, were actually retrieved by police or whether they were stolen with the police acting as accomplices. On a TV show yesterday, lawyer Marino (Vincho) Vinicio Castillo speculated over the possibility. Furthermore, TV show host Milagros German dedicated a large segment of her program to highlight that if you want to rob in the Dominican Republic, make sure you do it big, and she satirized all the million-peso robberies that had taken place while justice turned a blind eye, while petty thefts are commonly penalized with five-year jail sentences.
In a contribution to Hoy newspaper, Rosario Espinal comments that 85% of those interviewed for the 2004 Latinobarometro poll believe that the Dominican Republic is governed for the benefit of a small group of powerful interests, demonstrating the generalized perception of widespread social inequality. She says many values, such as the notion of common good, sense of nation and purpose of the state, have been undermined and replaced by exclusion, abuse, injustice, arbitrariness, cynicism and lack of confidence.