‘All cops are bastards’
THUS goes a mural in progress in Sitio San Roque compound in Quezon City in the afternoon of Jan. 18. Still in the thick of their paint job, the three boys—ages 17, 18 and 19—were reported by a security guard to the Quezon City (QC) Police, who immediately sent a team supposedly to arrest the boys.
The street artists were from the Save San Roque Movement. They have been painting public images critical of the government. Luckily for them that afternoon of the attempted arrest, a fellow member of their organization, a paralegal, came to intervene, questioning the cops on what law was being violated by the act. The team relented, but only after a heated exchange with the paralegal. The cops left a threat that they’d go there every day until they’ve annihilated everyone in the village.
Sitio San Roque, one of the poorest areas in the city, also caught the limelight in April last year when some of its residents were arrested after staging a protest to demand aid from the government.
The citizens of Sitio San Roque must have begrudged the arrest, and that must have been what informed the boys’ mural rendition of their resentment against the police.
What gives? The Philippine National Police must be worried. The San Roque altercation heated up after the paralegal shoved into the cops’ faces the case of now ex-policeman Jonel Nuezca, who shot pointblank a mother and a son in Tarlac in December last year.
The boys’ mural illustrates the sweeping reputational problem the police have in many communities. The QC cops’ way of rounding up the teens as a response to the mural shows just the kind of miseducation, or the lack thereof, not just on the basic law on free speech, but on their very role supposedly as “community peacekeepers,” peerless in the matter of patience and tolerance even if the diatribe was hurled against them. A blow to their pride isn’t a blow against the law.
In many countries today, police forces have been in a tricky position of trying to follow leaders who are embroiled in high-strung political upper game while supposedly enforcing the law and protecting the citizenry. In not a few countries, too, the supposedly “friendly neighborhood cop” have been armed to the teeth, indistinguishable from the military and in full battle gear even while manning friendlier community occasions.
This is just the kind of unfortunate situation that rends further the community’s relationship with cops. The San Roque incident just showed us that.*