A crowd of people wait under the heat of the noon day sun for the next Sinulog Grand Parade contingent along Osmeña Boulevard in Cebu City on January 19, 2020. | Alven Marie A. Timtim
CEBU CITY, Philippines — It was peaceful despite having at least 2 million people on the street and enjoying the Sinulog Grand Parade 2020 on Sunday, January 19, 2020.
This was the assessment of Police Colonel Engelbert Soriano, Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) chief, on the Sinulog Grand Parade crowd.
Soriano said that they estimated the Sinulog Festival event crowd to be from 1.5 million to 2 million people.
However, he did not say how he came up with the figure.
The 2 million crowd estimate was a million people lesser than the Sinulog crowd last year which was estimated to have reached at least 3 million.
Soriano, however, said that the he believed that there were more people who attended the event this year because according to police monitoring of the streets at noon to late afternoon, some of them were really impassable because it was filled with people.
“This afternoon I walked around the parade route sobrang dami talaga… sobrang spread out (It was very crowded, and they were all spread out),” said Soriano.
Despite the large crowd, Soriano said the police did not face any problems related to crowd control, crimes or received any threats while the event was ongoing.
But Soriano said they would have to continue their alertness and heightened security as there were still parties that might last until morning on January 20, 2020.
Read more: 18K Sinulog Grand Parade spectators at CCSC — police
Meanwhile, Police Major Elisandro Quijano, commander for security in Cebu City Sports Center (CCSC) and the chief of Abellana police station, said there were a few reported petty crimes in his station during the event.
He said these were mostly pickpocketing incidents and some were reports on missing children, which were reunited with the parents later.
He said that petty incidents like pickpocket cases were expected to happen in big events such as the Sinulog.
He said that at the CCSC grandstand it was also peaceful with no untoward incident happening there as well. /dbs