Weeding out talahibs
Azurin, prioritizing cleansing the PNP of misfits comes with his position, especially with Senator Ronald Dela Rosa, a former PNP chief, warned that rogue police officers may have gone back to their old ways.
Daily TribuneAzurin, prioritizing cleansing the PNP of misfits comes with his position, especially with Senator Ronald Dela Rosa, a former PNP chief, warned that rogue police officers may have gone back to their old ways.
Two rookie Makati City cops would have a bleak Christmas after they were arrested by the Philippine National Police Integrity Monitoring and Enforcement in an entrapment operation in Barangay Poblacion after receiving marked money dusted with photo fluorescent powder.
The policemen were put in cuffs by PNP-IMEG operatives — the scourge of scalawags and rogue members of the police — during the handover of money they allegedly extorted from a woman. In what may be a case of policemen preying on an alleged predator, the woman was herself, the subject of a complaint by a foreign national.
The foreigner claimed to have lost money and his automated teller machine card and pointed an accusing finger at the woman. According to the PNP report, the two cops took the woman's phone f tor use as digital evidence, but instead of bringing her to a police precinct for booking asked her to cough up money so she can retrieve the phone from them.
That's when the PNP-IMEG came into the scene with the woman turning the table on the cops and maybe his foreigner-accuser. No less than PNP chief, General Rodolfo Azurin Jr., received the report about the entrapment operation from IMEG chief P/Brig. Gen. Warren de Leon.
Azurin, prioritizing cleansing the PNP of misfits comes with his position, especially with Senator Ronald de la Rosa, a former PNP chief, warned that rogue police officers may have gone back to their old ways, including recycling drugs, with former president Rodrigo Duterte already enjoying his retirement.
And not only the scalawags in the PNP, but also from other law enforcement agencies as seen from the arrest of no other than a field officer of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and three of his men right at their headquarters in Taguig City.
The local government of Taguig could not be faulted for seizing back the office space it allowed the PDEA unit to use as there's a betrayal of trust when the people who should be fighting the drug trade are the ones making money from it.
The PNP-IMEG is just one unit that can take action on misfits in the police organization as the PNP Criminal Investigation and Detection Group based in Camp Crame can also crack the whip on them.
The National Bureau of Investigation can also do operations parallel to those handled by the PNP-IMEG and PNP-CIDG units.
On Friday, the PNP, in announcing the arrest of the two rookie policemen, also came up with a report detailing how it had sacked 279 cops for various administrative charges from 1 July to 7 December this year. It added that it demoted 79 and suspended 472. On the other hand, a total of 381 PNP personnel had been meted out penalties like the forfeiture of salary, reprimand, restrictions to quarters, and the withholding of privileges.
Among the cops recently dismissed by the People's Law Enforcement Board was a junior commissioned officer, a lieutenant, who shot dead a traffic enforcer on a claim that he was jacking a motorcycle. The traffic enforcer, as it turned out, was just helping a friend whose motorcycle broke down.
The lieutenant lost his job, but the traffic enforcer lost his life and the latter's family lost a caring, hardworking husband and father. The PNP's problem with trigger-happy, shoot-now-ask-later is one that is not going away anytime soon.
In all these, former president Duterte may be the most disappointed back in Davao with the men and some women in uniform who taint the organizations they belong to by engaging in criminal activities.
In 2016, many thought Duterte's campaign pledge of doubling the salaries of those in the uniformed services was from someone who was promising the moon, something undoable.
Digong proved his critics wrong by making good his promise so much so that upon entry into the PNP and the other services, a man or a woman can get a monthly salary of about P40,000 — way above entry level for most private sector jobs.
Yes, weeding out the talahibs in government, especially those who hold life-and-death power over citizens like cops and sometimes soldiers, should be a 24/7 effort by the authorities.
