Does reassignment reform bad cops?

“Public fear must be removed and transferred to the hearts of the criminals,” President Rody Duterte said in exposing police protectors of drug lords. Does transferring such officers to provincial stations serve that purpose? The question arises in light of increasing instances of bad cops turning worse while supposedly undergoing disciplining.

Last week the National Police brass reassigned 35 Quezon City policemen to faraway Western Mindanao due to drug links. The 35 were said to be favorites of the five “narco-generals” whom Duterte had alleged only hours before. Some of them recently had tried to rescue two drug contacts arrested by the Bulacan police.

The reassignment obviously aims to purge the QC Police Department and disperse the rotten eggs. Sulu and Basilan are hardship posts; those provinces teem with Abu Sayyaf Islamist terrorists who kidnap and behead with glee. The brass presumes that, if transferred there, the corrupted cops would reform their ways. But will they really?

Experience shows that most won’t. From drug payolas those cops have tasted the good life. They have acquired expensive tastes, gotten used to free spending, and likely even enrolled children in fine schools. They need to maintain lavish if dirty lifestyles. The brass would be lucky if a third of the 35 transferees return to the straight and narrow path within a year. More likely they’d corrupt other officers in their new precincts. Or they’ll simply go AWOL and resurface when the coast is clear.

Higher-ups notoriously are so poor in personnel discipline. Too often have bad cops gone underworld with badges and firearms – to commit worse crimes. How many carjack gangs were busted after years of riding roughshod, then found to have been led by AWOL cops? Some even openly dubbed their gangs by their baptismal names. They were among the 147 organized crime syndicates that the good cops disbanded in recent years.

Duterte knows the routine. Recently he shared his sad experiences as a young state prosecutor going after bad cops. The details shocked the audience at the turnover of the National Police command to his chosen Director General Ronald dela Rosa. Duterte’s story:

An officer with a case of, say, robbery, would skip town. The complaint would become dormant. Being AWOL, he’d be dropped from the rolls. But no problem, for he maintains contact with his excolleagues. After some months, they’d alert him that a new chief has taken over. He’d resurface and sweet-talk his robbery victim to desist. At the same time his lawyer would file with the judge to hasten his trial “in the interest of speedy justice.” The prosecutor would want to press the criminal case, but there will be no more complainant-witness. The raps would be dropped. The dirty cop would be reinstated to the service – with back salaries and benefits.

The mess has been going on for so long it has been “systematized.” Other parties even make money from cases of rotten cops. An example was the sergeant who in 2011 took hostage a busload of Chinese tourists at the Luneta, Manila. Earlier charged with extortion and illegal arrest, he had been suspended for years. Deprived of pay, he turned to loan sharks among his ex-colleagues. Soon money for litigation ran out. But he still had his uniform and official-issue sidearm. His last superior had not ensured to retrieve such government property. The guy also had an M-16, licensed by sleazy means, and a hand grenade, likely bought from the military black market. In taking hostages, he came up with an odd demand. He wanted to be reimbursed the hundreds of thousands of pesos he had paid a deputy Ombudsman. The latter was supposed to fix his case, but only kept asking for more bribes. His brother, also a policeman, tried to help him out of the SWAT cordon. He ended up being slain after shooting his hostages. A broadcast station made some more bucks portraying him as a victim. At the wake in his provincial home the national flag draped his casket.

Not all bad cops end up dead. Many rise up the ranks, then retire as higher gang lords. There must be a better way to handle them than mere reassignment. Going through the rotten legal “due process” seems to not work, given the example that Duterte recounted.

In the early part of the Arroyo admin, a new approach was tried. Individual and entire units of erring cops were sent to “rehab camp” in Subic Base, Zambales. There they underwent rigorous retraining, service re-indoctrination, and moral regeneration. Sadly the program was stopped with the mandatory retirement of the enthusiastic rehab general. Still, the National Police Commission would do well to measure if the program worked or not.

Of course, there’s need to shield the majority of good cops from the rotten eggs. Recruits must be screened well, and officers motivated with double pay (see Gotcha, 4 July 2016).

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They just go AWOL, then resurface when the coast is clear. Duterte knows the routine.