Rogue cops deserve to be shamed, says Lacson

Sen. Panfilo Lacson during the Senate hearing on the murder of Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo. (Photo by ALEXIS CORPUZ/Philippine Daily Inquirer)

Cops shaming the Philippine National Police (PNP) deserved to be shamed, according to Sen. Panfilo Lacson, a former PNP chief himself.

“They deserve nothing less,” Lacson said in reaction to the way President Rodrigo Duterte dressed down on Tuesday over 200 policemen with offenses who were presented to the chief executive as part of the PNP’s cleansing its ranks of rogue policemen.

He said the objective of the President in reassigning these policemen to Basilan and Tawi Tawi was to “uproot them from their areas of so-called influence.”

Lacson said he would support this move.

Lacson said when he headed the PNP he deployed erring policemen to “hardship posts” like Samar where they were far from “the usual comforts and conveniences they enjoy when they were in the National Capital Region.”

The president’s move to discipline these erring cops this way may cause demoralization to some in the PNP. But Lacson said this could also lift the morale of straight cops because they would see something being done about the problem.

Lacson said the abduction and killing last year of Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo really was a wake up a call to the PNP.

He also said the internal cleansing at PNP should have began before police officers were sent out to go after drug offenders.

Lacson also hoped that the next time the PNP present rogue cops to the President it would include their individual files stating the offenses they had committed.

Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III said he hoped cops with serious cases like murder should be charged in court so that they could be removed from the police force.

“What the President did is to send them to violence-prone Mindanao to pressure them to rethink if they still want to belong to the PNP or not,” Pimentel told reporters. /atm