In his usual off-the-cuff manner, President Duterte last week floated the idea of arming civilians—volunteer crime fighters—ostensibly to protect them from criminal elements. “The criminals must die, but you must live,” he said.
The latest idea to seize the President’s imagination became the subject of his talk at the launch of the Global Coalition of Lingkod Bayan Advocacy Support Groups and Force Multipliers in Camp Crame, where the President declared: “If you have this coalition, you have a list of people who are there who can arm themselves. I will order the police if you are qualified, get a gun, and help us enforce the laws.”
But this proposal makes no sense. The Philippine National Police boasted in February that crime has dropped by nearly half, or 49.43 percent. Thanks to COVID-19 restrictions and “enhanced (management) of police operations,” there was a “significant decline” in eight focus crimes, according to Maj. Gen. Marni Marcos, head of the PNP Directorate for Investigation and Detective Management.
Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra was sufficiently disturbed by the President’s idea that he cautioned against it. The proposal to arm civilians could goad them into forming vigilante groups, he warned.
Already, Sen. Richard Gordon noted, the number of vigilante killings by pillion-riding assailants have increased dramatically, with the police managing to solve less than half of these cases. Citing data from the PNP, Gordon said that from 2016 when Mr. Duterte took office until Jan. 31, 2021, at least 19,086 killings had been perpetrated by motorcycle-riding vigilantes, targeting lawyers, judges, farmers, rights activists, and drug suspects. Former police chief Gen. Debold Sinas claimed to have solved “a total of 9,040 or only 48.87 percent” of these cases.
Now the President is dangling before volunteer crime fighters the possibility of carrying their own arms, in effect deputizing them as gun-wielding law enforcers even as scores of policemen have been implicated in numerous cases of abuse of authority, trigger-happy behavior, and involvement in extrajudicial killings. Former police chief and now Sen. Panfilo Lacson pointed out the painfully obvious: “If our law enforcers who are supposed to be trained are prone to lapses, how much more in the case of untrained civilians?”
Horrific incidents of police officers shooting unarmed civilians at the slightest provocation were caught on video recently, among them Jonel Nuezca who killed a mother and son in Tarlac in December last year, and Hensie Zinampan who shot dead a 52-year-old woman in May.
As an institution, the PNP cannot outsource its sworn duty to serve and protect the public to armed volunteers that could easily transform into paramilitary groups prone to abuse and deployment as private armies by politicians. The most heinous example is the Maguindanao massacre in 2009, in which 58 people, 32 of them journalists and media workers, were killed by more than 200 police escorts and security aides of the Ampatuan political clan.
With elections less than a year from now, what’s to stop unscrupulous quarters from using the President’s proposal to build their own private armies in the hoary tradition of guns, goons, and gold in Philippine politics?
Even ordinary citizens apparently derive an overwhelming sense of power and invincibility when wielding a gun. As past incidents have shown, road rage incidents or traffic altercations quickly escalate into a shooting match when one or both parties are armed.
Though Malacañang has described the President’s idea as “not yet final and still subject to staff work,” this is not the first time Mr. Duterte has brought up the subject. In 2017 in Bohol, he broached the same idea after Abu Sayyaf terrorists were seen on the island. Former police chief and now Sen. Bato dela Rosa, a close associate since Mr. Duterte’s days as Davao mayor, also tried to sneak in an amendment authorizing the arming of firefighters in a draft bill on the modernization of the Bureau of Fire Protection. The amendment, Dela Rosa said, was “borne out of a request coming from Malacañang, from the President.” Fortunately, the Senate rejected the proposal.
The best way to reduce criminality is not by arming civilians and having guns fall into the wrong hands, said Sen. Frank Drilon, but to solve the roots of criminality—poverty and hunger—through good governance.
In a statement, the Commission on Human Rights also reminded the government that “(a)rming civilians without proper training, qualification, and clear lines of accountabilities may lead to lawlessness and proliferation of arms, which may further negatively impact the human rights situation in the country.” Agreed former CHR chief Etta Rosales, in a succinct summation: “Instead of putting a stop to the culture of killings, the government is opening the door to an infinite loop of violence.”