To serve and protect?

There is a chilling effect in being exposed to the hate speech and crass discourse prevailing today, particularly those coming from the ardent supporters of the president in social media.

Worked up in their own frustration of society, and living in conspiratorial fantasy, these trolls and fake journalists wish to drown out the mainstream media and discredit the latter’s traditional role – which ultimately they will never succeed in doing, because to borrow the words of Barack Obama, reality (like truth and gravity) has a way of asserting itself.

On the drug war, for example, behind their relative anonymity and the vast obscurity of the internet, supporters of the president impulsively post comments suggesting that every extrajudicial killing is drug-related and the victims had it coming.

Such kind of discourse supporting a hard knock or violent approach at solving a complex problem poses a danger to society. That is because once we lose touch with the basic principles behind the founding of state institutions, we invite an unpredictable and unstable social environment that will sooner or later manifest itself.

As social scientists have stated, institutions are regulations that cannot be reduced to purely practical concerns. “Without normative justifications, institutions would hardly be viable, despite their wide-ranging practical consequences.”

The police is an important example of such institution. The development of the police force was tied to the socio-political concept of “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force.” But in order for that monopoly to work in favor of law and order, it has to comply with certain conditions. Those conditions are articulated in Sir Robert Peel’s idea of “policing by consent”, a principle stating that the power of the police emanates from the approval and respect of the community which they serve.

APeelian principle states: “The police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

Among the most significant principles that Peel discussed in his speeches was that “the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.” Police officials who closely cooperate with the community and its leaders will likely need to use less physical force in order to maintain law and order.

With its expertise on crime prevention, for example, police can advise the city officials to place brighter lights on certain streets where side arteries are visible as well. Police can also guide the community where to place CCTV cameras. Police visibility and reach can be extended through effective community policing programs which involve volunteer civilians and village officials.

French philosopher Michel Foucault (1977) suggests the need to study the local geopolitics of power, to map out the boundaries where the duty of the police to maintain law and order may encounter difficulties. While it is important, for example, for police to arrest drug lords and their middlemen in order to neutralize the illegal drug trade, it is likewise important to address how and why the drug scourge persists and so many are still unaccounted for.

The police is duty-bound to follow the law, “to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary, of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.”

In the Philippines, human rights watchers have decried the alleged abuses of policemen under President Duterte’s drug war, pointing to the national police as the one “breaking laws they are supposed to uphold.” But taking their cue from a popular president, officers of the Philippine National Police are emboldened to dismiss such critical observations, and are seemingly not inclined to seek justice for thousands of victims of extrajudicial killings.

This week, 16 people died in Cebu in less than 24 hours in alleged drug-related shootings. Five of them were gunned down last Thursday in Barangay Malubog, Cebu City, by still unidentified killers. Police officials immediately held a press conference promising an investigation, this while denying the allegation by an alleged survivor that their men were involved in the Malubog incident.

Are Cebu’s police officials saying they will look for the perpetrators everywhere else but their own backyard? Oh dear. Foucault and Peel are probably rolling in their graves.