A criminal group in Caloocan City with a penchant for shooting people, which cost the city’s police commander and the district police chief their jobs, will soon be taken down, the country’s top cop vowed Tuesday.
Philippine National Police Director General Ronald dela Rosa vowed “drastic action” to pin down “hooded assassins” involved in the mysterious slaying of suspected drug personalities and civilians in Caloocan.
“There really is a group which is fond of shooting [drug] pushers and even those who aren’t [into drugs], and we are closely watching [them] and nearing a potential encounter with our police,” Dela Rosa said in a chance interview with reporters at Camp Crame in Quezon City.
He also dispelled insinuations that police are either tolerating the killings in Caloocan or are being carried out by “enforcers” that have led to unresolved cases and an alarming situation in the northern part of Metro Manila.
“We have to something about it, because it hurts [the PNP], especially if [the killings] are being attributed to the police,” Dela Rosa lamented.
The series of killings in Caloocan led to the abrupt sacking of city police chief Senior Supt. Jemar Modequillo, but the PNP chief did not attribute the relief to incompetence—rather, he called the former “unlucky.”
Modequillo was designated to Caloocan just days after the killings of 19-year-old Carl Angelo Arnaiz and 14-year-old Reynaldo de Guzman at the height of the PNP’s anti-drug “Operation Tokhang.” Their deaths were blamed on two Caloocan police officers.
“No matter how good a police official you are, when you encounter bad fortune, just like General Roberto Fajardo for the same case, he has to face the consequences for his bad fortune,” Dela Rosa said.
Fajardo, who was chief of the Northern Police District that includes Caloocan, was sacked following an investigation into the death of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos during an anti-drug operation in the city last August.
The NPD chief was “unlucky, but he has to face the consequences of his bad fortune. So, [Caloocan police officials] have accepted that they were unlucky, but what we really want is to stop the killings there,” Dela Rosa said.
Checkpoints were doubled, and police visibility increased in Caloocan to intercept the still-unknown killers, he added.