Why should rookies be college grads?

Why does a Police Officer 1 (PO1), the lowest rank in the police hierarchy, have to be a college graduate when all he should do is patrol the streets?

It doesn’t require much brain to do that.

A high school graduate or one who had several units of course work in college can make excellent patrolmen or patrolwomen (the former rank of the lowest-ranked cops).

However, policemen with officer rank—from Inspector to Director General—should be college graduates.

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You know why rookies don’t want to patrol the streets?

They find it demeaning because they’re college graduates.

That’s why you see them sleeping on the job or loafing around at the precincts because they think that the streets should only be for street sweepers or traffic aides.

So the Philippine National Police (PNP) should change its policy of accepting only college grads because most of them tend to be high-brow when they shouldn’t.

New cops have no reason to be supercilious since they can’t find other jobs as civilians.

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New police recruits show signs of indiscipline this early.

One sign of indiscipline is not cleaning up the premises of their camp site.

I notice that right inside Camp Bagong Diwa in Bicutan, Taguig City, home of the National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO), plastic bottles and discarded food wrappers litter the premises of the trainees.

After the trainees use the restrooms of the firing range, they don’t flush the bowl. Or they just throw objects into the bowl that cause clogging.

Don’t these guys have toilets in their homes?

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When Nicanor Bartolome retires in March next year, the next chief PNP chief should be as strict as a Marine drill sergeant.

I recommend Director Leonardo Espina, NCRPO director, for the PNP’s highest post because he is a disciplinarian. (In the PNP, a director is a rank as well as a position.)

Only two months as NCRPO chief, and he has made Metro Manila cops—the most undisciplined in the entire country—toe the line.

Espina’s brand of discipline is a tough act to follow.

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Vice Mayor Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte has received brickbats from the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) for putting up a reward for the capture—dead or alive—of a suspected leader of a car-theft syndicate in Mindanao.

Ryan Yu, alias “Baktin” (piglet) has a bounty of P5 million if his severed head is brought to Duterte, P4 million if he is dead and P1 million if captured alive.

So, what’s wrong if the police shoot him dead if he resists since he’s reportedly armed with an MP-5 machine pistol and Super .38-caliber pistol, and, therefore, very dangerous?

Decapitating a suspected criminal who resisted arrest no longer matters since he’s already dead anyway.

It’s Duterte’s way of sending a message to criminals to leave Davao City and do their thing elsewhere.

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As a kid, I remember seeing a severed head of a leader of a Moro outlaw band presented before my father, a Constabulary lieutenant, in our quarters in Seith Lake, Sulu.

The man had beheaded a soldier who was killed in an ambush, my father told me when I became an adult.

After that decapitation incident, no soldier killed in combat was beheaded by Moro outlaws, according to my father.