EDITORIAL - Curb the abuses

Three years after a new administration ended the brutal campaign against illegal drugs, the Philippine National Police must move to prevent a return of the abuses, with particular attention given to the PNP Drug Enforcement Group.

Last Sunday, eight PDEG members were arrested, with six others being hunted down, while their superior was sacked as chief of the PDEG Special Operations Unit in Calabarzon.

The PDEG members were arrested after a ninth-grade student complained that she was robbed and raped by the policemen who had tried to arrest her boyfriend in a drug bust in Bacoor, Cavite. The boyfriend, described by the PDEG as a high-value drug suspect, managed to flee, leaving behind his 18-year-old girlfriend.

Illegal drugs worth an estimated P584,000 were seized during the raid, the PDEG team claimed in a report to the National Police Commission, which is conducting a probe. But Napolcom officials noted that the drugs supposedly seized lacked documentation and the confiscation was not properly coordinated. Such supposed evidence could have simply been planted.

The incident came on the heels of the fatal shooting of three men on Nov. 18 near a gasoline station in Barangay Socorro, Quezon City, by another PDEG Special Operations Unit. The three, along with a fourth suspect who managed to escape, allegedly opened fire at the PDEG team.

But the items confiscated from the fatalities turned out to be packages containing noodles and pebbles. PDEG agents may be telling the truth when they say that the suspects planned to mislead the anti-narcotics team. Since dead men tell no tales, however, this will be difficult to prove.

The saving grace in this incident is that the botched operation came to light, like that raid in Bacoor, wherein the PDEG agents accused of rape and robbery were quickly arrested.

The PNP has yet to fully recover from the scandal that erupted over the kidnapping and gruesome killing of South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo in October 2016.

Police superintendent Rafael Dumlao III, the convicted mastermind, led a team from what was then called the Anti-Illegal Drugs Group in kidnapping Jee from his home in Angeles City, in the guise of conducting a drug raid. Jee was strangled to death in his own car right inside PNP headquarters at Camp Crame.

Dumlao remains at large, suspected to be enjoying the protection of former colleagues in law enforcement. Korean officials have been told that his wife works at the National Bureau of Investigation.

In 2017 following the scandal over Jee, the AIDG was dissolved and renamed the PDEG. The agency must show that its recent operations don’t indicate that old habits die hard, and that its name change is not merely cosmetic.