PNP community mobilization plan ‘copies Alsa Masa volunteerism’
CAMP VICENTE LIM — Despite drawing flak for comparing an intelligence-gathering program to a defunct vigilante movement, the top police official of Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon) said the police were still pushing for the expansion of the Community Mobilization Project (CMP) as a deterrent to crime.
Chief Supt. Edward Carranza, regional police director, said the only thing the CMP adopted from Alsa Masa was the 1980s anticommunist movement’s idea of “volunteerism.”
But unlike Alsa Masa, CMP volunteers will remain unarmed, Carranza said.
Carranza, during the Philippine National Police’s National Advisory Council Summit last week, likened CMP, an information-gathering network in the region, to Alsa Masa of Davao City.
Not police policy
Lawmakers and human rights groups opposed the revival of Alsa Masa or anything similar to the movement that morphed into a vigilante group accused of widespread atrocities in the southern Philippines.
Chief Supt. Benigno Durana, PNP spokesperson, said it was not the PNP’s policy to revive Alsa Masa or “adopt in whatever form the concept of Alsa Masa.”
But at a press conference here on Tuesday afternoon, Carranza said top PNP officials, particularly Deputy Director General Camilo Cascolan and Director Mao Aplasca, “deemed it necessary that [the CMP] be adopted throughout the country as the No.1 [deterrent] to crime.”
“I talked to the DO (director for operations), and in one of our phone conversations, he would like this presented … to be adopted throughout the country, depending, of course, on the decision of the chief PNP (Director General Oscar Albayalde),” he said.
Under CMP, 10 to 20 families are grouped into “clusters,” each one selecting a cluster leader and a cluster supervisor who will then report suspected criminals, drug pushers or communist rebels to the local police chief.
Raw information
Carranza said all raw information would remain “confidential” and would be verified by the police.
He said the police would not share raw intelligence with the military or the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency unless necessary.
Supt. Luis Pascual, chief of the Calabarzon police community relations office, said the CMP was proven successful, reducing the crime volume in, for instance, Santa Rosa City, Laguna, a CMP pilot area, by 44.78 percent from January to October this year.
The clustering system has so far been established “100 percent” in Laguna, Rizal and Quezon, and 93.7 percent in Cavite and 87 percent in Batangas.
Pascual said for the clusters to be fully functional, volunteers needed to undergo training on “Red-spotting,” a police term for identifying communist rebels, and disaster response.
