CAMP DANGWA, La Trinidad, Benguet – Uniformed and non-uniformed personnel of the Police Regional Office in the Cordillera (PRO-COR) lamented the alleged anomalous reassignment of some fifteen policemen from the different parts of the region to Mindanao pursuant to orders from the general headquarters related to the government’s aggressive anti-drug campaign.
The sources, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from higher authorities, revealed there were 15 policemen from the different parts of the region who were reassigned to Mindanao because of their alleged involvement in illegal drugs while they are being investigated for their derogatory records.
Eleven of the transferred policemen were reportedly involved in illegal drugs while four were involved in the protection of pickpocketing suspects. One of the 11 policemen with drug-related cases is a Senior Police Officer (SPO) 3 who appears to have no record of being involved in drugs but his younger brother was arrested for being involved in illegal drugs.
The sources claimed the demoralization among their ranks occurred when a lady SPO2 who earlier reported to Mindanao for being reportedly involved in illegal drugs suddenly came back to PRO-COR and subsequently accommodated by a regional police official as his secretary while another male police officer requested that he be transferred to the PNP Intelligence Group in Camp Crame.
“If our superiors are really supportive of the government’s campaign against illegal drugs, they should not accommodate the lady police officer because of her alleged proven involvement in illegal drugs. Our superiors do not have the right to talk about the campaign against illegal drugs if they themselves are coddling a police officer involved in drugs,” one of the sources stressed.
Worse, the sources disclosed some of their superiors are trying to defend their questionable decision in transferring SPO3 Alberto Tadeo to Apayao without imposing stiffer penalties against their aides who were the ones directly involved in the controversy but at the same time, they are trying to hide the fact that they brought back a lady police officer involved in drugs and even gave her a sensitive position.
According to them, it is best for their superiors to admit that it was their driver and security escort who committed the blunder involving Tadeo and to impose the appropriate penalties against them for similar breach of internal discipline for having brought their vehicle to the city’s number coding scheme area and even namedropped the name of a regional police official as the owner of the vehicle.
They claimed it is unfortunate that their superiors relied only on the side of the driver and their escort in effecting Tadeo’s transfer without according the devoted traffic enforcer due process, citing that the trust of the people on the PNP has been eroded because of the discriminatory practices and inconsistent actions they are seeing.
By HENT