Raids belie police claim of success vs video karera

CEBU — The police chiefs of at least five municipalities here may be relieved from their positions after last Thursday’s raids belied their earlier claims of success in their respective campaigns against video karera.

This may only happen though if provincial police director Vicente Loot makes good his earlier threat to sack any police chief who fails to rid his jurisdiction of video karera. He issued the warning during a command conference last March 7.

The five police chiefs who are now in hot water are from the towns of Carcar, Consolacion, Liloan, San Remegio and Pinamungajan.

The raids, conducted by intelligence and special operations agents of the provincial police, yielded three video karera machines in Carcar and one each in the four other towns.

Just three days after Loot issued his warning, the five municipal police chiefs issued certifications vouching for the supposed total absence of video karera in their respective jurisdictions.

Perhaps suspicious about the haste with which the police chiefs had claimed success in their anti-video karera efforts, the provincial police command decided to conduct the raids.

Nevertheless, Loot still gave the five police chiefs the chance to explain why video karera machines were found in their towns despite their certifications that there was none. "We will still give them due process," he said.

Superintendent Audie Villacin, intelligence and investigation chief of the provincial police, said somebody tipped him off that video karera operations were still on in Carcar despite the claim of the town’s police chief that it had been stopped.

Last Thursday, San Remigio police chief Laurel Almirante insisted that the town was already free of video karera. However, hours later, members of the Special Operations Group headed by Chief Inspector Juanito Enguera seized a video karera machine from a house just a few kilometers away from the police station.

The Freeman failed to contact the police chiefs of Carcar, San Remigio, Consolacion and Pinamungajan. But Liloan police chief Milo Dagasdas said, "I myself went the rounds to check but I saw nothing, that is why I signed the certification."

Of all the police chiefs in the province, only Lapu-Lapu City police chief Louie Oppus admitted having failed to curb video karera as of last March 11, the deadline set by Loot for them to totally get rid of the illegal gambling game.

Oppus claimed he managed to seize only about 80 percent of the video karera machines operating in Lapu-Lapu City but that his campaign against them was continuing. — Freeman News Service