A decisive step
IT seems the height of irony that barely a month after being awarded Best City Police Station, the entire Caloocan City police force was ordered sacked last Friday in the wake of the gruesome deaths of three teenagers and a raid of an elderly woman’s home where valuables were stolen.
The relief of some 3,500 members of the Caloocan police, to be done in batches, is indeed a decisive step deserving of public support if the Philippine National Police is to restore the people’s trust and confidence in uniformed men whose essence for being is to serve and protect.
“The reshuffle is a drastic measure but we have to do this to keep them away from their sphere of influence and prevent them from involvement in criminal activities in the future,” National Capital Region Police Office chief Oscar Albayalde told media.“It is not farfetched that they would follow the bad example of those involved in the killings and other illegal activities.”
He said about 1,200 personnel of the police force will undergo retraining and reorientation for 45 days before reassignment to other units outside Caloocan City. The relief order was issued a day after TV news showed CCTV footage where 13 policemen and two police assets that included a minor barged into a house in an alleged drug raid that turned into a robbery.
Prior to the incident, members of the Caloocan police had been in hot water over the killing of 17-yearold Kian delos Santos, 19-year-old Carl Angelo Arnaiz, and 14-year-old Reynaldo de Guzman whose common fate sparked immense public outrage and strengthened the perception that some policemen are simply coldblooded murderers.
Of course, there are still many men and women in uniform who remain loyal to their sworn commitment to serve and protect,who put their lives on the line, who always strive to enforce the law with utmost professionalism, and who would not tolerate colleagues who stray.
But the full force of the law must bear down on those who give the police force a sullied and demoralizing image, those who betray the trust bestowed on them when they are armed and equipped to uphold the law, those who make a mockery of their sworn duty when they become criminals themselves. In other countries, being a law enforcer who uses his position to become a law breaker is considered an aggravating circumstance that merits penalty at its fullest extent.
The sheer number of policemen believed to be rogue is staggering. While PNP Director General Ronald dela Rosa used to say that only about one percent of the entire PNP may be scalawags, President Duterte himself has said he believes that as much as four in ten are misfits.
The impact of bad eggs on the public’s perception of the police now depict the entire basket to be rotten—as what many cynics are now inclined to believe amid the continued failure of the PNP to cleanse its ranks.The grim reality is that even if the bad eggs are just a few, they have the capacity to exacerbate people’s deepening distrust of law enforcers and subvert confidence in the criminal justice system.
Many attribute the impunity of rogue cops to an apparent failure of leadership. They have a point. Leadership is a critical factor in any organization. If the quality of leadership in the PNP is exemplary in the quest for excellence, it should inspire full support of all personnel.
The continued presence of scalawags clearly shows an aberration in the system and the need for farreaching reforms. Among such reforms is the use of cameras attached to the upper part of police uniforms, to provide raw video recordings of encounters between law enforcers and the citizenry. It’s good news indeed that Caloocan Mayor Oscar Malapitan now wants to equip police with body cams.
A Cambridge University study in 2016 revealed that “police equipped with body-worn cameras receive 93% fewer complaints from the public” as it suggested “the technology helps to cool down potentially volatile encounters.”
“The cameras create an equilibrium between the account of the officer and the account of the suspect about the same event – increasing accountability on both sides,” said lead author Dr. Barak Ariel from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.
The study, conducted in 2014-15 in seven trial sites with a population of more than 2 million people, showed that complaints against police dropped dramatically – from 1,539 complaints (1.2 complaints per policeman) during the 12 months before the study, to only 133 complaints (0.08 per policeman) – when body cameras were used extensively.
“Officers begin encounters with more awareness of rules of conduct, and members of the public are less inclined to respond aggressively,” Dr. Ariel said as he explained the knowledge that encounters were being filmed made policemen “think about their actions more consciously.”
Reforms should also focus on other essential factors – like screening and selection of police recruits, education and training, values formation, periodic evaluation to determine continuing physical, emotional, mental, and moral fitness – to ferret out bad eggs.
Ferreting out bad eggs must be without letup considering their adverse effects on good policemen, especially with Albayalde having said that “it is not farfetched that they would follow the bad example of those involved in the killings and other illegal activities.”
The recruitment process should ensure shady characters are kept out, and pre-employment screening ought to spot red flags that must not be ignored. As the 19th-century social reformer Frederick Douglass said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”