Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana is being too timid when he says he opposes sending erring cops to Marawi City to fight terrorists, but that is his personal opinion.
It’s still an opinion, and we completely agree.
This is after all another harebrained idea by the chief of the Philippine National Police, Director General Ronald dela Rosa, who has been known to bob his head in public, dress up as Santa Claus, break into tears during a Senate hearing and make a spectacle out of a push-up exercise for cops involved in the slaying of a Korean businessman right within the headquarters of the PNP.
Dela Rosa made this statement after two policemen from Mandaluyong were caught beating a man they had apprehended for violating curfew laws.
The administration has been known to go soft on their errant members, perhaps taking the cue from President Duterte himself who promised to protect them should they be found guilty so long as they were doing it in the name of the war against drugs. Look at what has happened to members of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group-Region VIII who killed a suspected drug lord right in his own jail cell. They had been charged, all right, but the case had been downgraded to homicide—and the promise of pardon looms.
Dela Rosa’s proposal also prompted Provincial Crisis Management Committee spokesman and regional assemblyman Zia Alonto Adiong to say Marawi is not a dump for corrupt and abusive cops from the capital.
Earlier this year, cops with offenses from tardiness to alleged drug dealings were sent to Mindanao as some form of punishment.
More than ever, Mindanao needs good people. Erring policemen will become part of the problem, not the solution, in a place as precarious as Marawi. Dela Rosa’s penchant for throwing his cops in Mindanao trivializes the sensitive situation there and puts in danger the very people most in need of protection.
In the end, the proposal only betrays Dela Rosa’s misappreciation of the extent of the problem and overestimation of the cops’ ability to change. Why, he even dared the media—needlessly so—to bet against him that the policemen would shape up in no time.
They will be the best cops they can become, he said.
We don’t believe so.
The only way to deal with cops that mar the image of the police force is to conduct swift investigations and kick them out of the institution. They are an embarrassment, an abomination. There is no other place good enough to contain them. Certainly not in Mindanao.