EDITORIAL - Internal cleansing

Between July 2016 and March this year, 5,599 members of the Philippine National Police have been dismissed from the service, 714 of them for drug-related offenses. Police officials released these figures over the weekend to dispute an assessment of the US State Department that the PNP’s internal cleansing program has been “largely ineffective.”

That’s about three percent of the 220,000-member PNP. Apart from those purged, the PNP reported that during the same period, it also demoted 1,129 personnel for various infractions and suspended 10,490 others, reprimanded 2,475, forfeited the salary of 848, restricted 208 and withheld the privileges of 286.

While acknowledging the number of those sacked or imposed disciplinary sanctions, the US Department of State’s 2021 Country Report on Human Rights Practices pointed to continuing “numerous abuses” committed by members of Philippine security forces. The impunity was the report’s basis for describing the internal cleansing program as “largely ineffective” – an assessment that the PNP leadership decried as “very sweeping” and unfair.

After registering its opposition to the US assessment, the PNP can consider the report as a challenge to intensify its housecleaning, which is being undertaken by the Internal Affairs Service together with the PNP Integrity Monitoring and Enforcement Group.

The PNP continues to attract and breed rotten eggs, and cleansing is a sustained effort. While there have been fewer reports of drug suspects being killed allegedly for resisting arrest or nanlaban, cops continue to be suspected of such killings and accused of planting drug evidence. Complaints of police abuses emerged in the enforcement of pandemic restrictions in the past two years.

Critics have lamented the slow pace of investigation of possible abuses in the deaths of over 6,000 drug suspects in the course of police operations. Apart from drug deaths, police officers have also been implicated in the disappearance of over 30 online cockfight aficionados, and in political killings even before the ongoing election campaign.

PNP officials say apart from purging or penalizing erring cops, personnel who commit minor infractions are given a chance to reform and provided spiritual guidance. This is a laudable program, but the PNP must acknowledge that it will take time and a sustained effort on its part before people are convinced that abuses and violent short cuts to law enforcement have been sufficiently excised from the police service.