CAMP OLIVAS, Pampanga — The Police Regional Office 3 (PRO3) announced Wednesday a first-of-its-kind initiative to deploy 8,000 private security guards as auxiliary crime preventers during the holiday season, aiming to curb theft, burglary, and crowd-related crimes in high-risk areas.

The guards, employed by 23 agencies under the Philippine Association of Detectives and Protective Agency Operators (PADPAO) Region 3, will undergo mandatory training starting November 5. The program, developed jointly by PRO3 and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), covers crisis response, intelligence reporting, and coordination protocols with law enforcement.

“This is force multiplication at its most strategic,” PRO3 Director PBGEN Ponce Peñones Jr. said in a statement. “By integrating skilled private security professionals into our crime prevention framework, we effectively triple our visibility in hotspot zones without overburdening taxpayers.”

The guards will be deployed to shopping malls, bus terminals, and residential subdivisions in Bulacan, Pampanga, and Nueva Ecija—provinces that accounted for 68 percent of holiday-season crimes in Central Luzon last year. They will work four-hour shifts outside their regular duty posts, identifiable by orange armbands with scannable QR codes to verify authenticity.

Private security firms will cover the guards’ P500 nightly hazard pay, while PADPAO Region 3 has allocated P100 million for insurance to cover on-duty injuries. NICA Regional Director Ulysses Untalan confirmed that the agency will provide real-time threat assessments to both police and participating guards.

Security law specialists consulted by Daily Tribune warned of potential legal ambiguities in the initiative. “The line between citizen’s arrest and police authority becomes dangerously blurred here,” said one expert specializing in security sector regulations, who requested anonymity due to active litigation involving private guards. “PRO3 must publicly define what ‘auxiliary’ means operationally—can they detain suspects or merely observe?”

Another specialist pointed to Article 11 of the Revised Penal Code, which governs citizen’s arrests: “If a guard oversteps, who’s liable—the individual, their agency, or the state? This partnership needs airtight protocols to prevent legal free-for-alls.”

PADPAO Region 3 President Dr. Jorge Ibarra emphasized safeguards: “All personnel operate under a PRO3-supervised protocol. Their role is observation, rapid reporting, and non-confrontational deterrence—not law enforcement.”

The initiative, set to launch November 15, will be evaluated in January for possible expansion under House Bill 6543, which seeks to institutionalize private sector–public safety partnerships nationwide.