Preventing abuse

For going shirtless outside his house in Novaliches, Quezon City, Genesis Argoncillo is dead. The 25-year-old was among the first persons to be rounded up on June 15 in the ongoing campaign targeting istambays – loiterers or idlers in the streets – and tossed into jails already overwhelmed by detainees in the war on drugs.

Worse than the overcrowding, however, was what Argoncillo’s relatives described as bullying by his fellow inmates who belonged to gangs. The relatives said Argoncillo was forced to fork out money so gangmen would stop bothering him. Argoncillo was beaten to death on the night of June 18 and died the next day. The police initially claimed Argoncillo had died after suffering from shortness of breath.

As the Commission on Human Rights launched a probe, the Philippine National Police sacked the commander of Station 4 in Novaliches, Superintendent Carlito Grijaldo, police jailer Dennis Santos as well as three other cops who were on duty during the beating: Senior Police Officer 3 Ronald Nanola, SPO4 Valerio Perez and Inspector Oliver dela Cruz. At the same time, two members of the Sigue-Sigue Sputnik gang have been charged for the killing.

Police have been rounding up vagrants for several decades, to keep children and beggars off the streets, apprehend sex workers and their pimps, and generally help prevent criminality. Vagrancy, however, has been decriminalized. And the mass enforcement of city ordinances related to loitering, implemented arbitrarily without clear guidelines on how to go about it, is highly prone to abuse.

While the filing of charges against the gang members and sacking of the police officers on duty are welcome developments, authorities must review the conduct of this anti-crime measure. Or else there could be more Genesis Argoncillos. And this campaign can erode public trust in the police and backfire in preventing crime.