As someone who tried to downplay the murder of Kian Santos by police officers during his tenure as PNP chief, senatorial aspirant Rolando “Bato” dela Rosa is in no position to declare the conviction of these same police officers as proof of the Duterte administration’s commitment to go after police scalawags.
“Kana nagpamatood nga ang inyong pulis, ang gobyerno wala ginatolerate ug ginacondone ang binuang nga binuhatan sa kapulisan (It only means that the government does not condone the bad behavior of the police),” dela Rosa told reporters during a weekend visit in Cebu City.
Yet anyone who bothered to search through news clips of his Senate testimony on Kian’s death online can attest that the former PNP director general even claimed that the youth, who was clearly seen being dragged by police officers prior to his death, was “not as innocent as he seems.”
We can only hope that President Rodrigo Duterte and his chosen candidates in next year’s elections refrain from trumpeting the court ruling that convicted three cops for Kian’s murder as evidence of success in his campaign to clean the police of scalawags.
If anything, the court ruling on Kian’s killers had the benefit of security camera footage that provided reasonable cause to establish the guilt of these cops.
More often than not, the targets of these anti-drug operations that often end up dead have no potential witnesses in sight to refute allegations of “manlalaban” (violent resistance to arrest) on their part.
And we’re not even talking about the summary executions carried out by ski-mask wearing and motorcycle-riding vigilantes who kill their victims even in broad daylight whom many suspect (rightly or wrongly) to be either cops or former cops on the payroll of drug syndicates.
Yes, the court ruling on Kian’s death is significant but we hope it would be the norm and not the exception to the rule and the law against summary executions which this administration skirts while encouraging their law enforcers to use extreme measures to deal with illegal drug suspects and even fellow law enforcers who crossed the line.
And isn’t there a proposal for police officers to wear body cameras in order to monitor the conduct of their anti-drug operations?
National budget constraints notwithstanding, even that idea is doubtful if one were to consider the similar complaints against law enforcers in the US, who can either turn off or manage to work in such a way as to avoid being singled out by their body cameras.
There’s more to the war on drugs that just piling up the body count and that is to cut off the flow of illegal drugs from all sources into the streets, which this government had found at best sporadic success in and to bring the traffickers to justice.
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