The President’s luck continues to run high.
As scandalous 1findings surfaced about the involvement of rogue PNP elements in the kidnap-slay of Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo, the second anniversary of the Mamasapano massacre came due the other day. It served to remind the public about the often-tragic heroism on the battlefield of the Special Action Force, an elite PNP unit.
It also gave Duterte an opportunity to displace those negative headlines with the more dramatic news of his decision to resurrect the official inquiry into Mamasapano. In effect, we were asked to weigh the death of one individual (a foreigner at that) victimized by grossly corrupted cops, on one hand, versus the deaths of a large number of Filipino troopers victimized by gross negligence abetted by outsized ambition at the very top, on the other.
I don’t know where the balance of public opinion will tilt. But it’s revealing that former President Aquino decided to speak out—his very first material public statements since stepping down last year—after his former spokesman Edwin Lacierda accused the Duterte administration of hunting for “alternative facts” (the derisive phrase used these days by mainstream American media against the spinmeisters of President Trump).
Clearly these are matters of some gravity. And since it was PNoy who popularized the notion of presumptive guilt of one’s predecessor, I know he won’t begrudge Duterte the same conceit—not only on Mamasapano, but also on the question of when exactly the PNP started going to the dogs.
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The death of Jee-san is repulsive, not only because each life matters, but also for the circumstances under which it was taken: an unsuspecting foreign visitor preyed upon by men in uniform whom we’re obligated to trust (on pain of punishment for resisting arrest), the crime committed within the confines of a secure police facility in which we ought to be able to feel at our safest.
I do not believe there are any more bad eggs in the PNP than there are in any other human organization. But the special rights and powers entrusted to them—including the authority to take human life—magnify the import of individual sins among them to literally life-and-death proportions.
This is why the PNP has set forth rules of engagement, operational procedures, even varying categories of intelligence-gathering. These are all intended to constrain the capacity for individual wrongdoing in their ranks within clear and very binding rules of behavior. This is non-negotiable.
But when those rules seemingly start being observed more often in the breach, what is to be done?
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I recently observed an online crowd-sourcing exercise that yielded up the suggestions below from two former PNP chiefs, both of whom had served under PNoy’s predecessor (that might be significant in the context of blame-finding).
Let me paraphrase the most important ones below:
“Identify and segregate likely scalawags who already have records. Validate this with lifestyle checks.”
Would it be asking too much to involve military counter-intelligence units as well, perhaps supervised by a joint task force at the highest level? The problem in PNP may be that serious. This could be the kind of police-military cooperation that might have saved troopers’ lives in Mamasapano.
“Internal cleansing. Early retirements to separate those with records, in part because the filing and processing of cases takes a lot of time.”
This is where the (perhaps overly) popular General Bato De la Rosa may have to bite the bullet. He ought to be able to enforce the principle of command responsibility by ordering his regional commanders to purge their respective commands within a definite period of time.
“Don’t rush recruitment ahead of the cleansing process. Hire quality, not quantity, even if it means dispensing with the usual networks of classmates and mistahs.”
General De la Rosa has in fact already breached network etiquette by being promoted over the heads of several classes. The injunction on quality is timely, although I doubt that we have an excessive number of policemen, in relation to both our population and our crime rates. It may thus also be timely to conduct a right-sizing audit of the organization, redefining duties and reporting lines as well as reshuffling personnel, in order to put more cops on the beat, among other objectives.
One suggestion for SOPP: “Ensure that raw material in ‘Information Reports’ is thoroughly processed and validated, from the lowest ‘F-6’ grade (reliability of information unknown/unconfirmed) up to “A-1” grade (completely reliable/confirmed by other sources) intelligence, before this information is used to make arrests.”
Another SOPP suggestion: “To avoid malpractices by anti-drug operatives, the PNP should conduct debriefings alongside investigation of drug suspects as part of the post-operations protocol for buy-bust operations. This is to ensure that the Rules of Engagement or PNP Operational Procedures are strictly followed.”
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Other comments were also proffered by civilians, some helpful (set up a special hotline for victims of potential shakedowns), others probably less so (restore the Philippine Constabulary and put it under the military’s Articles of War, to facilitate summary court martials of scalawags).
It’s heartening to see the depth of public concern for the PNP, that they will be able to flush out their scalawags and reduce if not eliminate the reasons for the public not to trust them. I see no reason to expect this sentiment not to be reciprocated by officers and gentlemen of General Bato’s evident sincerity, provided they understand that today is a time to apply the toughest kind of love to their men.
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