The hostage drama has highlighted the bungling incompetence and ill-preparedness of the Philippine police. Negotiations with the hostage-taker, handling of the media and crowds during the crisis, and the actual assault on the bus with hostages on board revealed a tragicomic police team with poor equipment, confused management and fatally amateur skills. Kidnapping and hostage-taking are routine in the Philippines, with 135 reported cases in 2008 and 138 last year, according to risk consultancy firm Pacific Strategies and Assessments. Ransom payment in the millions of pesos is common. In this latest incident involving Hongkongers, the hostage-taker, former police officer Rolando Mendoza, who had lost his job due to charges of corruption, did not demand a ransom. Instead, he wanted his former job restored. His story and the tragic end to the crisis underline intractable problems with two Philippine institutions. In law enforcement, the national police force has had a long and continuing history of corruption and politicisation trumping professionalism. Police posts can be bought. Many officers advance by serving politicians and their private militias rather than the cause of law and order. Businesses routinely have to give free goods and services to uniformed officials. Police abuses, including torture of detainees and extrajudicial killings, are well documented. Officers have been implicated in kidnapping and hostage-taking - for example, kidnapper weapons have been found with serial numbers from local police arsenals. Those who do want to build a more professional force find themselves severely under-resourced. Pay is poor for rank-and-file officers. Budgets for world-class training and equipment do not exist, while corruption plagues police procurement. Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that the police failed to execute a quick, precise and effective response to Monday's hostage crisis. The tragedy spotlights a second ailing institution: the Philippine judiciary. Mendoza displayed a desperation enacted numerous times by other aggrieved Filipinos who have chosen to execute their own violent justice instead of seeking redress through the courts. The Philippine judicial system is chronically inefficient, with backlogged cases numbering over 800,000 at the end of 2005. Many judges are perceived to be corrupt. Individuals without powerful connections are likely to see their cases languish for years, with little hope of a fair outcome. At the same time, citizens also have access to millions of legal and illegal firearms in the country. This deadly combination partially underpins the Manila tragedy. Institutional problems reflected in the hostage drama are arguably most serious in Mindanao in the southern Philippines, where the majority (60 per cent in 2009) of Philippine kidnappings and hostage-taking occur. Given the frequency of these incidents, Mindanao police might be expected to display greater operational efficiency. But this has not been the case. The police often fail to resolve such crimes, and victims' families may not even report their situations to the police or media. Instead, in Mindanao, the armed forces are frequently brought in for negotiations, patrols and search-and-rescue missions. Results have been mixed. Like the police, the military has its own share of institutional challenges and shortcomings as it seeks to deal with Muslim insurgencies and communist rebellion. Only when individual leaders decide to address systematically the ailing key institutions of the Philippine state can there be realistic hope that Monday's tragedy will become an extremely rare occurrence in the country. Astrid Tuminez is assistant dean and director of research at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore