Philippine police more concerned with public relations than work
MANILA: Described many times as the largest in U.S. history, the investigation into the terrorist attacks that struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 has moved with deliberate speed and gained impressive results.
To be sure, there have been some lapses, but all told the investigation -- unwieldy as it must be, with some 4,000 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation alone -- offers a textbook case on what to do and how to do it.
Would that the Philippine police would sit up and actually take notes.
This is not to say that the country's police force has had no shining moments of its own. Only last month, in a classic entrapment operation, members of the PNP pulled off what law enforcers call a "sting," flushing out former officers of the now-defunct Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force who were attempting to sell bugging equipment the PAOCTF had acquired during the waning days of the Estrada administration.
The PNP also played a key role in the 1995 arrest, in Pakistan, of Ramzi Zhmed Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. True, there was an element of luck involved (a member of Yousef's terrorist cell inadvertently started a fire at an apartment in Ermita, Manila), but the national police responded adroitly and speedily when the opportunity presented itself. Eleven police officers even testified at Yousef's New York trial, helping cement his conviction.
But ask the man on the street about criminal investigations, Philippine style, and chances are he will point to what amounts to a caricature of police work: the televized "presentation of suspects" or "presentation of evidence" that our police officials are wont to stage.
We do not mean to suggest that these presentations be done away with -- only that these have been distorted by a police culture that prizes public relations at the expense of real investigative work.
The breezy admission three weeks ago by police general Reynaldo Acop, former chief of the PNP's narcotics group -- that the police regularly use tawas, or alum, in place of shabu (methamphetamine hydrochloride) when they present evidence seized from drug traffickers to media -- makes sense only in this context of PR-driven police work.
He said it was "foolhardy" for the police to present all the shabu they seize. Fine; we can understand that. But why stage a presentation that purports to show the entire haul of illegal drugs? Wouldn't a sample package of the real thing, with an explanation from the police detailing the scale of the shipment, more than suffice?
The answer, as anyone who has a TV set can readily guess, lies in the PR value of the "evidence." A sample, a gram of shabu, isn't dramatic enough.
But putting all the kilos of confiscated shabu on display will guarantee TV airtime -- and, not coincidentally, make police officials preening over the haul look good onscreen. Never mind if, by Acop's admission, most of what the public sees on TV isn't for real. After all, to the police mindset that accepts the exchange of tawas for shabu, what the public sees isn't so much evidence as it is a set of props.
The same confusion of media coverage with real police work applies to the naming of suspects as well. It is a confusion that afflicts other government agencies. The result is a gradual but steady erosion in the practice of a basic civil right: being assumed innocent until proven guilty.
Witness the questioning of the Saudi Airlines pilot, Mohammad Bukhari, who was set to fly a scheduled flight from Manila to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the day after the terrorist strike. In front of a horde of reporters and TV cameras at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, he was taken into custody by agents of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency. The reason: suspicion that he was a brother -- a mere brother -- of Adnan Bukkari, identified by the FBI as a possible terrorist.
But the pilot was later released. Worse, the FBI admitted that Adnan Bukhari was mistakenly identified as a suspect and had, in fact, passed a lie detector test. Where does that leave the poor pilot, whose tumultuous detention on television marked him out as guilty? Just another prop in yet another PR show.
-- Philippine Daily Inquirer/Asia News Network