Relieve all Fuente police, says city mayor

WITH allegations of police brutality directed at the Fuente precinct, Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama said he wants the personnel , including their chief, transferred.

At least 15 police officers were on duty on Easter Sunday, when 11-year-old Chastity Mirabiles was picked off the street and brought to the station, according to regional police problers.

“That’s why I need to know — who are these people?  I don’t want a sacred cow,”said Rama.

“They are all presumed to be innocent but in order to be fair and so that it won’t appear as if we are covering for them, let them be somewhere else,” Rama said.

He said he would discuss this with Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 director Chief Supt. Prudencio Bañas.

Bañas, in an interview, said it would be unfair to pull out all Fuente policemen.  Only those identified as being involved in the abuse should be transferred, he said.

“It is unfair for other policemen not involved in the controversy,” he said.

Some policemen in the Fuente station, who asked not to be named, said they were willing to face investigation and be relieved from their posts as “good soldiers.”

As mayor, Rama can recommend the reassignment or detail of PNP members outside the city as part of his authority in the PNP law.

Rama invoked his “supervision, operation and control” over the police.

He said Chief Supt. Wildemar Tiu, the precinct chief should be transferred as well.

“Tiu should not be back” at his post in the meantime, said the mayor, especially after a bar girl in a radio interview described how Tiu allegedly forced her to perform sexual favors in the station for him and his men, after she was apprehended on a charge of vagrancy late last year.

“The situation has now expanded. Way aso makumkom (Smoke always finds its way out). Whether we believe it or not, as mayor, there are intervening moves to be made,” Rama said.

He commended Tiu for his efforts to improve peace and order and rescue street children who proliferate in Mango Avenue but said the issues coming out against him should first be resolved.

In a sworn statement, before he took a one-month vacation leave, Tiu said he had no  knowledge or hand in Chastity’s death.

He said the Fuente station had no record of apprehending the child on Easter Sunday and that  the  accusations against him were “exaggerated and maliciously concocted.”

His statement was dented, however, by the discovery by investigators of the PNP Women and Children Protection Desk, who  looked up the “pink blotter” in the Fuente station and found out that at least 14 minors were “rescued” on Easter Sunday.

The name of Chastity was not on the list, though.