I don’t begrudge Jun Simon, officer-in-charge of Quezon City, all the free advertising you gave him (Apr. 14) . . . it’s just Simon’s luck to have a father-in-law who happens to be one of your classmates.

But couldn’t you have been your usual critical self when you went over Vic Silayan’s rhapsodies over his son-in-law? Consider Simon’s tendency to apply American solutions uncritically to local problems.

In the United States, Simon says, "you can dial a cop in an emergency and there’ll be a prowl car or a policeman on the spot within three minutes," and then he goes on to lament the lack of policemen, prowl cars, and gasoline.

What Sison does not see (the six months of slumming in barrio Magsaysay notwithstanding) is that even if he had as many cops and prowl cars as New York City, it wouldn’t mean a darned thing because of the miniscule number of people with phones.

Nor will the number of cops and prowl cars make a difference even if we had the same telephone-to-residents ration as Los Angeles. As U.S. police departments learned long ago, what cuts down the crime rate is not how quickly police respond to a telephone complaint but how quickly citizens call the police after the trouble starts.

Neither Simon nor Silayan ask themselves what good would it do if the police can get to any trouble spot within three minutes after receiving a call it noted, calls till after the rumble is over and only corpses are left on the ground.

Nor do I blame them. Questions like "How many people have telephones?" or "Will people even think of calling the police in an emergency?" are not asked in the movie world that Silayan lives in or in the utopian world that Simon learned about at the Ateneo.

Karla V. Castillo