THE Senate is suspending its hearings on kidnapping-for-ransom incidents involving corrupt policemen due to the government’s suspension of its war on illegal drugs, Senator Panfilo Lacson said on Monday.
Lacson, who heads the Senate committee on public order and illegal drugs, said it would be wise for the Senate to wait and see how the changes in the anti-drug war would work out.
“In view of the massive restructuring of the war against drugs to focus on rogue cops as ordered by the President, it is my view that the Senate [should] wait and see how this latest development plays out,” Lacson said.
“After all, the President has taken a positive action on the matter and I feel that the committee on public order and dangerous drugs has partially achieved one of the purposes of its legislative inquiry.”
The next hearing of Lacson’s committee had initially been scheduled for Feb. 2.
At last week’s Senate committee hearing, Lacson had closed-circuit television footage played showing rogue policemen planting drugs in an office that they eventually raided.
Lacson said he had the video played to stress the need for internal cleansing in the PNP, the agency he headed from 1999 to 2001.
For now, Lacson said, he would focus on the pieces of legislation that may at least minimize the abuses by police personnel in conducting anti-crime operations.
Those include bills on the training of police personnel as well as the strengthening of the PNP’s Internal Affairs Service.
Meanwhile, Lacson reiterated the need for systemic measures to prevent abuses by law enforcers. He said crime may not be eradicated but could be minimized.
“I have said before that it is impossible to eradicate crime, but quite doable to greatly minimize it. As such, there should be systemic moves to deter, if not prevent, abuses by those tasked to stop criminality,” Lacson said.
Senators Grace Poe and Bam Aquino supported his decision to temporarily stop the Senate hearings on kidnappings for ransom.
Aquino praised Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa’s order to stop all anti-illegal drug operations nationwide to focus on “internal cleansing,” saying it will help restore the public’s trust in the police.
“This is a step in the right direction for the PNP as it works on regaining the public trust after several controversial incidents involving bad elements within the organization,” he said.
Aquino earlier said that rogue policemen were capitalizing on the government’s war against illegal drugs for their personal gain.
During the Senate committee on public order and illegal drugs hearing on the kidnapping and murder of a South Korean businessman on Thursday, Aquino urged Dela Rosa to also focus on removing the bad elements within the organization.
Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros said the Duterte administration was guilty of implementing a corrupt war on drugs.
“It is but right for them to heed the people’s demands to stop it,” she said.
“With this move, the PNP owns up to its abuses and confirms that indeed the war on drugs operates on similarly corrupt foundations.”
Hontiveros said there was absolutely no need for the government to resume the abusive war on drugs amid the conflicting pronouncements of the PNP to stop it and Duterte’s pronouncement that he would extend the drug war until the last day of his term in 2022.
As an alternative, she proposed a strong public health framework to respond to the drug problem together with a regular and rules-based law enforcement approach to drug-related crimes.
“This should spell the end of the flawed anti-drug campaign. Internal cleansing will only restore moral authority to the PNP if the war on drugs, the unwarranted killings, is stopped permanently,” Hontiveros said.
She said the government’s war claims an average of 1,000 lives a month. To continue with this human rights-deficient anti-drug campaign until 2022, we will be looking at 72,000 deaths.
“This means creating the Philippines’ very own killing fields.”
Senator Leila de Lima said she continues to worry about the state of the President’s mental health.
“He displays signs of cognitive dissonance not only in his carefree monologues but worse, also in his official pronouncements,” she said.
She said Duterte’s latest incongruence between his factual assertion of a rotten police force on the one hand and his reliance on them to continue prosecuting his drug war as official government policy had dire consequences.
She warned this would mean more killings by corrupt policemen.
“And, as the kidnapping of the Korean shows, these criminal acts won’t be limited to drugs, as we have predicted, but will definitely expand to other police “cottage industries” like kidnap-for-ransom and business shakedowns.
The moment Duterte turned the PNP into a vigilante death squad, its transformation into an organized criminal syndicate had been completed.
She said the PNP under Duterte could now be considered as the most organized criminal group in the country.
“When you speak of organized crime in the Philippines, you speak of the PNP under Duterte.”