Metro Manila policewomen to do duty as ‘customer relations officers’
MANILA, Philippines — The National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) plans to remove male police officers from front-desk duty and replace them with their female colleagues, supposedly because the latter are more patient and sympathetic. The female desk officers will be called “customer relations officers,” according to NCRPO director Maj. Gen. Edgar Alan Okubo.
“[The male desk officers] will be replaced with female police officers because they have the patience in listening to the complaints of the public, our customers,” Okubo told reporters on Friday at Camp Bagong Diwa in Taguig City.
The change, he said, was prompted by the “bad” feedback the NCRPO had been receiving about the policemen currently manning front desks, as reported to him by the regional intelligence division. The NCRPO covers the 16 cities and lone municipality making up Metro Manila.
Experimental
“There are some reported instances where male officers manning desks take a long time to even acknowledge the requests of our customers in police stations,” said Okubo, who took over as regional director last month.
The men to be relieved of front-desk duty will be given field assignments to increase police visibility on the streets, especially at night, he said.
But Okubo explained that the changes would still be experimental and applied to only 45 police stations in the five police districts under NCRPO’s command — 16 in the Quezon City Police District, 14 in the Manila Police District, seven in the Southern Police District, and four each in the Northern and Eastern districts.
“If it will be effective, we will institutionalize it. I just want to fully utilize our female police officers because of their patience to listen to the stories of our customers,” he noted.
Explaining why the female desk personnel would be called “customer relations officers,” NCRPO spokesperson Lt. Col. Luisito Andaya Jr. said: “We treat out kababayan (countrymen) as our clientele. We do not want to make the wrong connotation.”
Public hesitation
People in communities sometimes hesitate to approach male officers at the stations because they tend to be “aggressive looking,” Andaya said, adding that by putting women in that position any wrong impression can be immediately dispelled.
“It’s actually giving them (female officers) an opportunity to exercise their capability, what they learned as police officers. Because they are equally trained and as capable as our men in police uniform,” he said.
Of the total 229,623 personnel of the Philippine National Police, including PNP cadets and nonuniformed personnel, currently 21.51 percent or 49,400 are women.
Only 17.87 percent or 2,820 women in the PNP are part of the Officer Corps, or those assigned to leadership positions at different levels of the organization.
In October last year, the PNP welcomed its first-ever all-women recruit class composed of 150 candidates. They are currently undergoing the Basic Recruit Course and are expected to report to their assigned units upon completion of training.
