To reduce crime by five percent next year, the Philippine National Police (PNP) has vowed to respond to crime incidents within 15 minutes and ramp up the number of foot and car patrols by 25 percent.

These and other targets are contained in a “promissory note” the PNP has attached to its P72.1 billion budget request for 2014, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto revealed today.

Recto made the disclosure as the national police marked its 112th anniversary Monday amid a perceived surge in crimes against persons and property.

Recto welcomed the PNP’s vow for a faster response time to distress calls, saying that if maintained “it can be a deterrent against crime because nothing dissuades a criminal more than the certainty of arrest.”

“If pizza companies can promise to deliver your pizza in 30 minutes or you get it get free, then why can’t the police have that same response time in life and death situations?” he said.

But for “criminals to be stopped from being gone in sixty seconds, our police must be given all the resources so they’ll be in the scene of the crime, not in sixty minutes, but in seconds as well,” Recto said.

This can be addressed, he explained, by the proposed allocation of P100 million for new structures, P1.8 billion for new vehicles and P925 million for other equipment in the agency’s 2014 budget.

Also enumerated in the PNP’s “major final outputs” for 2014, Recto added, is the pledge to promptly investigate a projected 629,258 incidents next year and a five percent jump in the apprehension rate of “most wanted criminals.”

It also vowed to arrest five percent of the “most wanted” within 30 days of receipt of the court-issued warrants of arrest, prompting Recto to call for an improvement in the “apprehension rate.”

According to the PNP, reported index crime in 2012 was 129,161 cases while those in the non-index crime category was 88,651 cases, for a total crime volume of 217,812

On a daily basis, 22 murders and 74 robberies were committed last year.

“But the above are just the reported crime incidents, the blottered incidents, which could just be the tip of the iceberg as majority of crimes remain unreported to the police in this country,” Recto said.

Recto said the national police has an authorized “uniformed personnel ceiling” of 151,410 in 2012. It has an adjusted budget of P67.5 billion this year.