Antidrug war: Fear of God cannot sub for body cams

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian. (Photo from the Senate Facebook account)

Fear of God alone cannot stop police excesses in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, a senator said on Friday.

“It is absolutely absurd to suggest that fear of divine retribution in the afterlife would be more effective than body cameras in addressing police impunity and holding dirty cops accountable for their crimes during our life here on earth,” Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said in a statement.

Gatchalian’s statement came in the wake of the response of Philippine National Police Drug Enforcement Group chief Joseph Adnol to the senator’s Senate Bill No. 1576, making it mandatory for police to have body cameras to document their operations especially in the antidrug campaign.

Heavy-handed

According to the bill, footage collected from these devices could also serve as concrete evidence against abusive law enforcers.

Adnol, however, said that there was no need to equip policemen with body cameras “(since) our camera as policemen is God.”

Gatchalian said that while he supported the government’s aggressive crackdown on illegal drugs, he was critical of the police’s heavy-handed approach to eliminating drug personalities.

“The fear of God alone was clearly not enough to prevent police scalawags from committing extrajudicial killings during the PNP’s previous drug war operations,” the senator said, adding that his bill would make the police’s antidrug operations more accountable and transparent.

SB 1576 was filed amid a spate of drug-related killings, including that of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos and other minors in what police claimed were legitimate antidrug operations.  Closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera footage of the killings, however, showed that the minors were unarmed, contrary to police claims that the suspects had shot it out with authorities.

Footage from surveillance cameras have increasingly played a significant part in crime investigation, with some local government units installing CCTVs in strategic locations to deter criminals.

But several instances showed that police had disabled or changed the angle of view of CCTV cameras in some police operations, including the alleged buy-bust operation conducted in October by a team from the Manila Police District’s Moriones station.

‘Oplan Tokhang’

In Barangay La Paz, Makati, in September, three drug suspects who had earlier surrendered to barangay officials under the “Oplan Tokhang” program were killed by gunmen dressed in police uniforms.

The barangay chair in the area said the two CCTV cameras had stopped working before the shooting because two watchmen on duty “may have pressed the wrong button.”

In November last year, Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. of Albuera, Leyte province, was shot dead after an alleged shootout with police who were serving him a search warrant inside the subprovincial jail in a predawn operation.

A report submitted after two Senate committee hearings on the killing said that the police, headed by Supt. Marvin Marcos, took the hard drive of the CCTV cameras in the jail.

Source: Inquirer Archives