What did the congressional inquiry into the strip search conducted on inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) achieve or hope to achieve provided it is an ongoing investigation?
Not much, except giving former Cebu governor and now Rep. Gwendolyn Garcia of Cebu’s 3rd district a national platform to berate and humiliate Cebu Gov. Hilario Davide III, who admittedly didn’t do a bang-up job in reining in illegal drug activity inside the CPDRC.
The central issue, the strip search in fact, wasn’t the governor’s specific order since the regional Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) took full responsibility for the highly controversial activity.
Let’s focus on the strip search itself: as previously discussed, the process had been considered invasive by rights groups who even believe and insist that a pat-down is downright questionable since it can be abused by inspectors especially if it involves women.
That the strip search only involved male inmates didn’t reduce the humiliation felt by them one bit since it was done before the women inmates who were also grouped into the compound where the inspection was held.
But as the governor argued and PDEA Regional Director Yogi Filemon Ruiz insisted, the strip searches had yielded various drug caches and weapons that would not have otherwise been located in a conventional search of cells housing these inmates.
And as Ruiz and other police officials would tell the lawmakers during that inquiry, the inmates are adept at spilling their own blood or the blood of inmates infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that would discourage and scare off the police personnel inspecting their cells.
What is the gist of that congressional inquiry? We hope the committee that included Garcia would be able to present to the public any substantial findings that would probably improve the procedures carried out by PDEA and the police in searching for drugs inside the cells.
But as things turn out, the campaign against illegal drugs involves taking some extraordinary measures including strip searches. Even in the US, the use of scanners that detect any possible illegal contraband in a person had been challenged by rights groups who insist that it is invasive and that it violates a person’s right to privacy even in a world that had been dogged by terrorism.
We cannot expect the provincial government to plan to buy nor be inclined to purchase such equipment when it is already facing funding problems in building an additional jail facility in the first place.
The congressional inquiry is but an obvious attempt to score political brownie points, but let’s continue to hold out hope that something constructive and substantial will come out of these proceedings.