The House Committee on Public Order and Safety on Tuesday grilled officials of the Laguna Police Provincial Office over the alleged irregularities hounding their office, including purportedly acting as personal escorts of the local chief executive of the city.

Laguna Rep. Ann Matibag, whose privileged speech in early May sparked the probe, alleged that 15 policemen assigned at the local government unit of San Pedro City function as personal bodyguards of the mayor and his family.

Art Mercado is the incumbent mayor of San Pedro, Laguna.

"That is a bad practice in the PNP, and it is an abuse of power. We hope that it is not true. Because if it’s, we need to penalize somebody,” said Santa Rosa Rep. Dan Fernandez, the panel chairperson.

The call for the congressional probe arose after some PNP officials got “reprimanded” for allegedly escorting Matibag during a local fiesta within the city on 26 November last year.

Matibag deemed the reprimand order “unacceptable,” given that the PNP patrolmen involved merely initiated crowd control at the said public event.

P/Lt.Col. Tyrone Valenzona, chief of San Pedro Component City Police Station, vehemently denied the allegations.

Valenzona admitted that the mayor asks for securities “but not for his personal capacity but for some activities.”

A month after the incident, Pat Epol Hipol, one of the police officers who allegedly acted as a security escort to Matibag, was abruptly reassigned from San Pedro to Binan, the timing of which raised the eyebrows of panel members.

Hipol claimed he was oblivious to the grounds of the reassignment order.

1-Rider Partylist Rep. Bonifacio Bosita, a former police officer himself, said that such cases had been a longstanding “malpractice” in the PNP.

“That should be corrected. If you are reported [to the higher-ups], you will be fired. So, when that happens, our police will be afraid to work properly,” he said.