OP-ED | OPINION- EDITORIAL: Cops into drugs

Over five months after senior Philippine National Police officials were told to submit their courtesy resignations by the chief of the Department of the Interior and Local Government, criminal charges have been filed against 50 PNP officers from the rank of lieutenant colonel up.

The charges filed by the DILG before the Office of the Ombudsman involve drug offenses, graft, falsification, perjury, obstruction of justice and malversation of public property. Administrative cases have also been filed before the National Police Commission against 48 of the officials still in active service.

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All the indictments stem from a raid in October last year that led to the seizure of 990 kilos of shabu valued at P6.7 billion from an office warehouse in Tondo owned by a police master sergeant, Rodolfo Mayo Jr. He is now detained and has been dismissed from the service. Probers said 42 kilos of the confiscated shabu were pilfered apparently for sale or “recycling.”

Of the 50, the highest-ranking are Lt. Gen. Benjamin Santos, who was the PNP operations chief at the time of the raid, and Brig. Gen. Narciso Domingo, who has since been sacked as head of the PNP Drug Enforcement Group. Other ranking officials were also part of the PDEG, which had conducted the raid. Both Santos and Domingo have professed innocence.

The DILG has maintained that it has a strong case against the 50 officers. If the charges stick, the DILG deserves commendation for the PNP housecleaning. But it also highlights the serious rot in the PNP, which was one of the problems in the brutal war on drugs that the previous administration under Rodrigo Duterte had carried out relentlessly.

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Even Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, said to be the architect of Oplan Tokhang when he was Duterte’s PNP chief, has openly said his biggest regret in waging the bloody campaign against drug trafficking was that it was not preceded by a thorough cleansing of the forces that would carry out the war.

Last Monday, Duterte lamented that the country has “a fractured police force,” with its members forming their own drug trafficking syndicates. Consistent with his approach to the problem, he said such rogue cops deserve to be killed, because it is tough to catch law enforcers involved in drug trafficking. “Shoot them dead,” he said in his radio program. “I do not find any redeeming factor.”

The Marcos administration has chosen a markedly different approach to the drug menace. With the legal tack it is pursuing against allegedly dirty cops, the current administration must show that its non-violent approach is better.

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