Law enforcement in our country is notorious for its incompetence and downright criminal behavior.
The police force is also widely perceived to be corrupt. Indeed, many of its personnel are either administratively or criminally liable for various offenses, from extortion to grave misconduct to extrajudicial killings.
According to the National Police Commission or Napolcom, during the 10-year period from July 2016 to November 2025, 9,027 police personnel were dismissed, part of a total of 32,698 who were found guilty of administrative offenses. These cases are just a fraction of the reported infractions, as the Napolcom dismisses 9 out of 10 complaints made against allegedly erring police personnel.
On the issue of incompetence, even the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), the supposed premier law enforcement agency, is prone to clear miscalculation. For example, why would it assign two female agents to arrest a burly former police chief like Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the chief implementor of the Duterte administration’s “war on drugs,” a person who clearly wanted to evade arrest as he had already been in hiding for the past six months (and is once more on the lam)? Unless the female agents had the skills and were built like mixed martial arts champion Ronda Rousey who could armbar an opponent to submission in the blink of an eye, they did not stand a chance against Bato, whose forté was reportedly combatives more than academics during his years at the Philippine Military Academy.
Also, if they were serious about arresting Bato, why did the NBI not have a breaching team when he outran them and sought shelter in a room? The NBI could not go through a door? Unless of course the arrest operation was designed to fail. In which case the matter goes from simple incompetence to something sinister.
Speaking of inability to breach, one remembers the 2010 Rizal Park hostage-taking and massacre in which a disgruntled, dismissed police officer armed with an assault rifle, a handgun and a knife took a bus full of foreign tourists hostage. He also had a brother in active police service at that time, and whose arrest on live television in fact triggered the massacre of eight Hong Kong tourists who were among the hostages.
Pitifully, the Special Weapons and Tactics team from Manila’s Finest could not get the tourist bus door open or quickly breach the windows when they were finally forced to attempt to assault the bus and rescue the hostages, many of whom were by then dead.
The media also played vulture and crisis-escalator, with their irresponsible blow-by-blow coverage as the incident progressed (which the hostage-taker was monitoring). The then broadcaster Erwin Tulfo was particularly enterprising, even appointing himself as hostage negotiator. (He eventually became one of the top vote-getting senators in our sensational-news-oriented country.)
This botched police operation and media circus were an international embarrassment.
The spectacular law enforcement failure was also the first bookend to then President Noynoy Aquino’s administration, having happened just a couple of months after he took office.
The other bookend occurred in 2015, toward the end of Aquino’s term—the country’s worst law enforcement debacle, the Mamasapano massacre during which 44 Special Action Force (SAF) policemen were killed.
There is not one single factor deemed responsible for the massacre, but a host of factors that all contributed to the largest loss of life among law enforcers in a single incident. Not the least of these factors was the failure of the backup SAF unit to come to the rescue of their comrades. They were apparently ordered to stand down for fear of offending the Moro parties to the Bangsamoro Basic Law which was then being negotiated.
Scratch a sensational crime and you’ll likely find that a police officer or an entire group of them is involved. From the 1991 Vizconde family massacre (police destroyed or “lost” crucial physical evidence); the 2000 Dacer-Corbito kidnapping and double murder by members of the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force; the 2009 Maguindanao massacre of an entire convoy of a local politician’s family, journalists and even hapless motorists who came upon the scene; the 2016 kidnapping and killing of a Korean businessman right in Camp Crame, the headquarters of the Philippine National Police; the 2020 broad-daylight killing of unarmed military intelligence agents by local police in Jolo; and the long-running case of the “missing sabungeros”…The list is long and wearisome.
But there’s more. Our law enforcers’ most stellar performance as executioners came during the Duterte administration’s “war on drugs,” which saw the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug users and dealers, not only in their homes but also in government facilities (such as in a jail cell or a city hall lobby). To “leave no trace,” no police report was made of many of these killings.
And it’s in our day-to-day experience. As we are seeing now. And smelling now. If our law enforcement has the smell of rot, there is something also highly suspicious in the behavior of the political leadership on both sides of the political divide. It is this political coddling and patronage that makes impunity prosper.
The ongoing brouhaha over the unserved International Criminal Court warrant of arrest for Bato, who gave the slip once more to sloppy law enforcement at the Senate, and the failure to arrest long-suspected “missing sabungeros” mastermind Atong Ang despite enough time to put him under strict surveillance and finally arrest him when the warrant came out, are two sides of the same coin.
The greater danger is that when there is widespread incompetent law enforcement, there comes loss of faith in our institutions, then loss of faith in our ability to govern—and the enemy at the gate, now in our West Philippine Sea, will surely benefit.
Our pulis patola are laughable, but not at all funny. CS
