The trouble with President Rodrigo Duterte’s and Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s dangling of money in exchange for liquidating rogue cops is that it distances the problem from the wheels of justice.
In short, their offers of bounty — P5 million from Duterte and P50,000 from Osmeña for every dead “ninja cop” — only advance the cause of injustice in our sociopolitical life.
Normally, a court of law has the sole authority to issue a warrant of arrest for a policeman or woman credibly accused of crooked ways, unless the same person, caught in the act, warrants pursuit or immediate arrest.
Duterte’s and Osmeña’s monetary enticements, however, do not unequivocally invoke everyone’s — even suspected rogue cops’ — right to due process of law but encourage a bloody self-cleansing by the Philippine National Police (PNP).
This defective approach will only lead to more mayhem as random, unverified lists of crooks and malicious gossip become more than ever favored means of pinpointing alleged criminals and “alleged” protects no one from a violent end.
The President and the mayor need to think again.
Surely, they do not intend to shift the energies of police officers from preventing or battling crime on the streets and in the neighborhoods to a decimating internal purge.
Surely, they have countenanced how easy it is for a prize-thirsty, black-hearted policeman to kill another and say, when the other is dead and unable to face his accuser, that he was killed for having gone rogue.
Surely they know that it is better to capture alive a scalawag in uniform who may be interrogated or cross-examined for information that can lead to the dismantling of crime rings.
Mayor Osmeña has been careful to at least make a qualification that rewards are in store only for those who lawfully kill hoodlums among cops. But that leads us back to the question of who legitimately tags the hoodlums as well as to “rub out or shoot-out” questions that hound police engagements, not to mention questions of public safety and of liability for innocents killed in the crossfire.
Besides, in their road to integrity that the President envisions, our policemen do not need yet another directive to excel to be richer. That insults policemen who work hard for love of country that should be the sole motive for peace and order work, and belittles the taxes of citizens, the source of police salaries.
President Duterte himself had mentioned that up to 60 percent of our police force is corrupt.
Instead of entrenching corruption by monetizing instincts to kill, rightly condemned by the Catholic Church and the Commission on Human Rights, he should inaugurate a strategic plan that brings into synergy the interior and justice departments as well as the Office of the Ombudsman in cleaning up the PNP.