BENIGNO S. AQUINO’s presidency has many negative distinctions. His championship of the art of messy failure (which in Tagalog is the more juicily onomatopoeic notion of kapalpakan) reaches a zenith in his most injurious failure of all—the trebling of criminality during his tenure.

There were only 324,083 crime incidents in 2010 (from June 30 to Dec. 31 he was already President). These increased to more than a million incidents after two years and continue to increase up to now.