Garma’s maelstrom

Former police colonel Royina Garma’s explosive allegation that the police organization was turned into a paid lethal killing machine during the Duterte drug war provides the compelling impetus for the immediate cleansing of police ranks.

Garma’s tell-all certainly needs further investigation and corroboration. But her allegations are serious enough to warrant the urgent call for a no-nonsense cleansing of police ranks since she effectively painted the Philippine National System (PNP) as a broken institution with blood on its hands.

Moreover, a cleansing is urgent since we don’t know as yet the damaging effects of the criminal police practices allegedly committed during the drug war on the organization or how damaging was the alleged reward system on the police’s institutional integrity.

So we are hopeful the current police leadership’s announced plan to conduct difficult impartial investigations of its own members involved in unlawful practices is a serious and extensive endeavor.

We certainly hope the police leadership acts with due dispatch, even if it means quickly suspending the scores of active senior and junior officers implicated in Garma’s confession.

But even as the current police leadership grapples with whatever problems will come their way in holding their own people accountable for the bloody drug war, we certainly hope they keep steady in the face of tremendous political pressure, particularly after Garma implicated former President Duterte and some of his associates.

In Garma’s grueling 14-hour testimony during the House Quad Committee hearing last week, she essentially divulged Duterte’s move to replicate Davao City’s drug war model all over the country.

She detailed the organizational structure, the operations, the rewards given to police officers for killing drug personalities, and apparently the creation of a secret parallel police task force to coordinate the drug war.

Garma alleged that recently resigned Napolcom commissioner Edilberto Leonardo headed this secret parallel task force when he was a police colonel.

Garma said Leonardo allegedly had authority over the entire PNP, the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), and other law enforcement agencies and that he allegedly briefed all incoming PNP chiefs, intelligence officers and other agencies on the drug war.

Leonardo has denied all of Garma’s claims.

But whatever the truth of Garma’s claims and the extent of the involvement of major political and police personalities in the drug war, the fact remains that Garma’s shocking allegations presented a grim picture of unlawful police practices.

Of those notorious illegal practices, the apparent hasty compilation of lists of drug suspects, often without verification or due process, stood out.

Besides shady lists, Garma’s allegation that police officers received rewards to execute those on the lists led to the phenomenon of police officials setting quotas for arrests and deaths, and ambitious officers vying to “neutralize” suspects to further their careers.

If Garma’s claims are proven true, police officers virtually became judge, jury and executioner during the drug war.

The police can’t be entirely blamed, however.

Other government institutions — including prosecutors and judges — also need to account for their failure in not responsibly checking the police trampling of people’s “constitutional rights, including the right to due process, a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.”

On this point, noted US-based criminology professor Raymund Narag says “evidence manipulation and false crime scene narratives” by police eventually “undermined the judicial process, casting serious doubt on the integrity of the convictions secured during this period.”

As such, Narag says the Supreme Court “should mandate an automatic review of all drug-related convictions in the Duterte era. This review must scrutinize the validity of the evidence presented, particularly in light of Garma’s testimony, and determine whether individuals were wrongfully convicted based on manipulated or fabricated information.”

But whatever may be proposed on systemic reforms, the main point remains that we are now in the days when more people and institutions are actively prying open the truth of the bloody Duterte drug war.