The idea is too preposterous to be laughable — coffee shop talks that the Philippine National Police (PNP) leadership has allegedly been given a marching order to limit media access to its operations and data to, purportedly, create the illusion of fewer crimes being committed under the Marcos administration.

The alleged motive would undoubtedly merit no more than a knee-jerk blanket denial by the PNP top brass, but the conditions on the police media beat, especially in Metro Manila, may lend credence to its underpinning premise.

Reporters and photographers pounding the police beat badly miss those days, like during the time of chief PNP Guillermo Eleazar, when they were allowed real access to the police to properly do their jobs of reporting on the actual state of law and order prevailing.

Dedicated police-media chat groups, alas, have become nothing more than avenues for the PNP to spoon-feed members of the media with only the information that it is comfortable releasing to the public.

Even lousy spot reports that mimic or approximate those found on good old-fashioned physical books have gone scarce, if they can be found at all these days, in those chat groups. In their place sprouted “deodorized” PNP praise releases that only the lazy members of the Fourth Estate would use without question.

If the crime statistics that the PNP regularly releases would have any credibility at all, PNP Chief General Benjamin Acorda Jr. should bring back the vibrancy of police-media interactions to make police operations in the country more transparent.

Doing so would help the PNP solve its problem of ensuring that media members are available to serve as mandatory witnesses during operations, especially those involving the sale of illegal drugs.

In a recent case decided by the Supreme Court, it acquitted Gerald Flores and Harrold Francisco over charges they sold undercover police officers shabu, or poor man’s cocaine, for the failure of the PNP to comply with the “mandatory insulating witness rule.”

The rule requires apprehending personnel to conduct a physical inventory of the seized items, as well as the documentation of the same through photographs immediately after seizure and confiscation, all this being done in the presence of a representative from the Department of Justice, the media and an elected public official, usually from the barangay.

The SC emphasized that the witnesses, who are required to sign copies of the inventory and to be given a copy, should already be physically present at the time or near the place of apprehension.

As buy-bust operations under the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 are mostly pre-planned activities, the SC reckoned that the prepositioning of the witnesses near the areas of operations should not be difficult for law enforcement agencies like the PNP.

“It is at the time of arrest — or at the time of the drugs’ seizure and confiscation — that the presence of the three witnesses (prosecutor, media and public official) is most needed, as it is their presence at the time of seizure and confiscation that would insulate against the police practice of planting evidence,” the SC said.

The quoted statement of the SC speaks a lot about the very credibility of the police that three witnesses are needed to ensure against police officers framing up people they’ve arrested through the planting of evidence. An unfair conclusion by the SC? Maybe so, except that those who came up with the “witness rule” were clearly guided in their distrust of the police by past events.

Certainly, limiting media access to what was in the past routine police-media interactions on the field adds fuel to this lack of trust in the police organization.