CODE-P

Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Alan La Madrid Purisima was participating in a shooting competition at Camp Crame on Jan. 6 when the news came in: 13 men had been killed at a police-military checkpoint in Atimonan, Quezon.

The guest of honor at the shoot fest was the country’s top gun enthusiast, President Aquino. He and Purisima received the report firsthand from another shoot fest participant, Chief Superintendent James Melad, PNP regional commander for Calabarzon.

As administration officials have said, there’s a presumption of regularity in such operations. Camp Crame announced that the operation targeted a band of hired guns, who supposedly opened fire instead of stopping at the checkpoint, prompting a return fire from the state forces.

The next day, when it turned out that nearly half of the 13 were police and military officers themselves and doubts started emerging about a shootout, the President’s deputy spokesperson, Abigail Valte, stuck to the story, saying the security forces acted on a tip and got lucky.

Purisima told The STAR Tuesday night that early on, he was already leery of the story. There were too many fatalities, he noted, and only on one side.

His suspicions were reinforced as he learned that the security forces involved in the operation initially kept out police scene-of-the-crime operatives (SOCO) from inspecting the site.

The PNP chief had another headache: Internal Affairs Service (IAS) members were not questioning the police officers involved.

Purisima sent word that if IAS members didn’t want to work, he would put them out of work. Only then did work begin in earnest on gathering facts and evidence that could lead to sanctions against the cops involved.

Many of the problems bedeviling the PNP are highlighted in this incident, which will likely end up being described, more accurately, as a massacre.

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“Salvaging” or summary execution “is against the law,” Purisima says; this has been told to PNP members often enough.

But what if senior PNP officers themselves are setting the example? Melad, for example, along with the ground commander in the Quezon operation, Hansel Marantan, apparently learned the ropes from their former unit, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force. The PAOCTF and its predecessor, the Presidential Anti-Crime Commission, figured in other mass killings of suspected criminals. PAOCTF members are on trial for the kidnapping, torture and execution of publicist Salvador Dacer and his driver Emmanuel Corbito. What do Filipinos do? We send PAOCTF chief Panfilo Lacson to the Senate.

Purisima says that this time, cops who forget that “salvaging” is against the law are likely to find their careers stuck in a rut.

Respect for human rights is now counted among the competencies considered for promotion in the PNP, according to Lina Sarmiento, chief of the Directorate for Police-Community Relations and the only female two-star general in the PNP.

Purisima would not assess his own human rights record. He had a motorbike accident, he said, which gave him temporary amnesia.

There are techniques in crime investigation, he pointed out, that are “sweet and sour – medyo paiinumin mo ng suka (make them drink vinegar).”

It is said that the Americans learned waterboarding from Filipinos. The added Pinoy touch is lacing the water with chili.

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Promoting respect for human rights is among the goals of the PNP reform strategy with the acronym CODE-P. The P is not for Purisima, who will serve as PNP chief until he turns 56 in November 2015, but for professionalism. CODE stands for competence, organizational discipline and excellence.

The objectives are noble; the next goal is to make cops understand that hewing to the objectives will truly enhance their chances of career advancement.

Changing the mindset and developing a professional police force starts at recruitment, Purisima told us during a visit to The STAR. The current vetting system (or virtual lack of it), however, provides many opportunities for misfits to enter the service.

So we have cops for whom police work is only a sideline although they collect their salaries every payday – the so-called 15-30 cops.

Political meddling is another corrupting factor in recruitment. Purisima calls it the “3-in-1” – a politician is paid P1 million to endorse three applicants for membership in the PNP, regardless of the qualifications.

The PNP chief is considering outsourcing police recruitment and vetting to a private agency. Whether this will insulate police recruitment from corruption remains to be seen.

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The PNP’s principal task is, of course, crime prevention. This is a challenge when the PNP, with 148,000 regular personnel, needs about 60,000 more for a police-civilian ratio of 1:500.

Since a total gun ban for civilians is unlikely, especially under the watch of gun enthusiast P-Noy, Purisima acknowledges that much depends on effective gun control.

This month the PNP will start tightening rules on gun licensing, to include fingerprinting of applicants. Licenses will be delivered to the addresses listed, where the applicant’s photo will also be taken, to ensure that the data is accurate and up to date.

Purisima says there are 532,000 firearms nationwide that have never been registered, with another 28,000 whose registrations have not been renewed.

I have always wondered how the PNP comes up with these figures. Purisima grinned and told me these were based on relatively sound intel estimates.

The PNP has also started encoding of ballistics information from registered firearms to create a central database and make it easier to trace weapons used in crimes. With 1.6 million registered guns nationwide, Purisima says this task could take 200 years.

On top of these challenges is the priority of the daang matuwid administration: to weed out corruption.

Increasing the take-home pay of cops to an entry level P21,000 has not put an end to kotong or penny ante extortion. Purisima says he’s not sure how much his monthly net is “because my wife took my ATM card.”

When faced with many challenges, Purisima aims for luck. A believer in feng shui or Chinese geomancy, he thinks the Year of the Snake, which begins on Feb. 10 (not 20 as printed in my previous column, sorry), will be a lucky year for those like him born in the Pig sign.

He can’t depend on luck to promote CODE-P. Sarmiento told us that for cops who can’t be disciplined, Purisima has sent word that they would be “electrocuted.”

With cops, that may not be a joke.