EXPRESSING concern for safety, Cebu City Prosecutor Liberia Rabillas asked the deployment of additional blue guards to monitor visitors going in and out of the Cebu City Prosecutor’s Office located at the Palace of Justice in the nearly two-hectare Capitol compound.
Provincial Civil Security Unit (CSU) head Roberto Legaspi said Rabillas cited that her office only had one guard and one janitor most of the time; while its main antique wooden door is broken.
There are also no closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) installed in the building.
“We’ll see if we can put up more guards over there just to closely monitor them, and inspect anyone going in and out of there especially during night time,” Legaspi said.
Legaspi had yet to determine the number of blue guards needed to augment security at the prosecutor’s office. At least 80 blue guards are under Capitol’s CSU, as of January 2016.
The city prosecutor’s office is located at the ground floor of the 26-year-old Palace of Justice.
The 22 courts of the Cebu City Regional Trial Court (RTC), eight Municipal Trial Courts in Cities (MTCC), and the Cebu Provincial and the Regional Prosecutors Offices once located in the upper floors of the four–storey edifice have been relocated after most parts of the building were declared unfit for occupancy for damages sustained during the 7.2 magnitude earthquake and Super Typhoon Yolanda in 2013.
In 2014, Cebu Gov. Hilario Davide III announced plans to rehabilitate the Palace of Justice at a cost of P1 billion. But issues between the Supreme Court and the Cebu provincial government regarding the lot’s ownership have stood in the way of the governor’s plans.