Sixteen people detained in a single twenty-four-hour period, every one of them for the same thing - drugs found during a search. Bitola, Prilep, Tetovo, Kumanovo, Ohrid, Skopje, the Berovo area. This is not a crackdown. This is routine.

The numbers in the police bulletin are entirely specific. Three detained in Skopje, found with marijuana and a white powdery substance. On the Ohrid - Kichevo highway, near the spot known as "Petlja", marijuana seized from a 43-year-old during a vehicle check on a car with Ohrid plates. One more on Ilindenska Street in Tetovo, another on 29 Noemvri in the same town - a nineteen-year-old. In Kumanovo, in Trizla in Prilep, in a hospitality venue on Debarca Street in Bitola, in a field near the village of Bratindol. And five people at once at a place called "Suvi Laki" near Berovo, all from different towns, all in one car.

That last detail is worth reading twice. A driver from a village near Gostivar, passengers from Radovish, Strumica and Radovish again - five people from four different places packed into one vehicle near the border at 22:20. The police log it as a routine check that turned up marijuana. What five men from half of Macedonia were doing in that spot at that hour, the bulletin does not say.

The same night, in the village of Bansko near Strumica, two homes were searched under court orders and two residents detained, aged 23 and 26. Marijuana again. And again: "appropriate charges will follow once the cases are fully documented" - a phrase the Interior Ministry repeats with such precision that it has stopped sounding like a sentence and started sounding like a rubber stamp.

Which brings us to the real question. Every day the bulletin delivers a dozen names reduced to initials and ages, every day the same closing line about charges to come. How many of those charges reach a verdict? How many end in a sentence severe enough to make anyone think twice? Nobody publishes that with the same enthusiasm they publish the arrest.

Because the number sixteen is two stories at once. One is that the police are doing their job - the patrols, the searches and the court orders clearly work. The other, less flattering one, is that there are this many people to arrest, every single day, in a country of two million. If every twenty-four hours yields sixteen, the problem is not the number of operations. It is the size of the pool they are drawing from.