EDITORIAL – Photo oops

President Arroyo has cut down on her photo sessions with arrested suspects, but the blunders that have marred some of the photo shoots continue. The latest was her presentation of an Abu Sayyaf suspect whose identity intelligence agents had gotten wrong. Mark Bolkerin Gumbahale was supposed to be Abu Pula, one of the top commanders of the Abu Sayyaf with a P5-million price on his head.

Gumbahale was arrested by police intelligence agents last Thursday at the Maharlika Village in Taguig and subsequently presented to Mrs. Arroyo, who in turn presented the suspect to the press. Even before his presentation to the Chief Executive, there were already rumors that Gumbahale was not Abu Pula, but the arresting unit insisted they had bagged the right guy. A witness finally said the cops got the wrong man; the real Abu Pula is believed to be at large in the jungles of Sulu.

The blunder has been a major embarrassment not just to the Philippine National Police but even more so to the President. Criticisms of the photo ops have put her on the defensive, and major booboos have forced her to minimize the photo sessions, which were supposed to highlight her administration’s resolve to stamp out criminality. In the most notorious case, a cashier who had blown the whistle on alleged anomalies at the Land Bank of the Philippines ended up as a suspect, with the National Bureau of Investigation leaving it up to her to prove her innocence before the public.

For the fiasco over Gumbahale, Director General Hermogenes Ebdane Jr. of the Philippine National Police has issued a public apology. But the damage has been done to the credibility of both the PNP and Malacañang. The credibility problem of the PNP was bad enough before the mess. Now, each time suspects are trotted out by the President to the press, people will wonder if they are again seeing suspects with the wrong identity, or worse, fall guys. And people are wondering how often such cases of mistaken identity have happened. Such blunders deal a serious blow to the government’s anti-crime campaign, and President Arroyo should come down hard on the persons responsible for her latest embarrassment.