No more ‘salvagings’?

We must be undergoing a sea change. Time was when people merely shrugged off reports that law enforcers had "salvaged" or summarily executed crooks. Human rights advocates who came to the defense of slain members of the Red Scorpion Group and the Kuratong Baleleng gang were dismissed as bleeding heart leftists.

For many years it was common knowledge that law enforcers resorted to summary executions. Gambling lords, pickpockets and other lowlifes knew they had to lie low each time their area of operation got a new station commander or police chief. Otherwise the lowlifes could end up as "floating bodies" in some river – a grisly warning to crooks to get out of town. The killers were never haled to court for murder or human rights violations, and citizens even found comfort in the thought that they had fewer thugs to worry about.

This tacit public approval emboldened law enforcers. It didn’t take long for some of them to start shaking down known lawbreakers, including drug traffickers. When the crooks refused to or could no longer cough up protection money, they were relieved of their troubles – permanently.

Some law enforcement units also organized their own groups, ostensibly to serve as infiltrators of crime rings but actually to function as criminal gangs. These groups were invincible – perpetrating bank robberies and ransom kidnappings and sharing their loot with their handlers – until they became a liability to their creators and had to be taken out. Then the handlers even won promotions for neutralizing a notorious criminal group. And few citizens cared.

Panfilo Lacson was elected to the Senate despite gaining notoriety for summary executions. He projected a tough stance against criminality – something that his supporters, with good reason, thought the country needed.

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So how come people are now horrified by the stories being told by Mary "Rosebud" Ong and are lending her a sympathetic ear? The individuals she says were chopped to pieces and burned by members of the now defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force were drug traffickers, members of the Hong Kong triads.

Her stories aren’t even new. She’s been telling those stories long before the senatorial campaign, and even when Lacson was still chief of the Philippine National Police and the PAOCTF. Reporters could get in touch with her through former PNP chief Roberto Lastimoso and Senior Superintendent Reynaldo Berroya.

How come Rosebud, a.k.a. Mata Hari, has become more believable now that she’s telling her story to the Senate in her Empress Dowager apparel? Maybe John Campos helped throw public sympathy her way by rebuffing her.

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At any rate, Rosebud is a compelling witness, and I hope this public outrage over extrajudicial methods of law enforcement will last beyond the Senate hearings. Public indifference to such short cuts to law enforcement encouraged laziness among cops. Instead of taking the trouble to file a case in court and prosecute a crook, there were cops who found it easier to just shoot a suspect dead. Some favorite official explanations for the killing: the suspect tried to escape, the suspect tried to grab a cop’s gun (even when the suspect was handcuffed).

You probably won’t care about such incidents as long as the dead suspect is the real offender and is not your relative. But what happens when someone dear to you has a brush with a cop and gets framed up? You have to guard your loved one 24 hours a day and make sure he does not make any move that may be construed as trying to escape.

Because law enforcers aren’t too concerned about making their cases stand in court, they are also sloppy about evidence gathering, preservation of the crime scene – the nitty-gritty of detective work.

Also, cops are probably thinking that the PNP doesn’t have the laboratory equipment anyway for scientific sleuthing. But the PNP is beefing up its crime laboratory, and our cops should start weaning themselves away from building a case based chiefly on witnesses’ testimonies or admissions of suspects. Witnesses can be created – just ask Angelo Mawanay – and you can torture anyone into admitting even the killing of Jesus Christ.

If this outrage over summary executions keeps up, the PNP may finally be forced to stop resorting to short cuts to justice, and to start treating the public to some honest-to-goodness police work.