Lacson: Cops say reward money ‘pocketed’ by their superiors

Former Sen. Panfilo Lacson was unsurprised when he heard that then President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war had incentivized the police to kill suspected drug traffickers.

What retired police Col. Royina Garma divulged to the House quad committee was just an “official admission” of “scuttlebutts” and what he had heard about the drug war, Lacson said in an exclusive interview with the Inquirer Mobile.

Lacson also made it clear that a reward and punishment system is “part and parcel of leadership in any organization,” including law enforcement. Reward is used to motivate police officers, while punishment is used to “deter possible malfeasance or misbehavior,” he said.

“But it should be official, in the form of medals or promotions, but never monetary considerations,” he said.

Asked about his thoughts on the war on drugs, he said: “Because of the passion of the commander in chief (to rid the country of drugs), it was abused. Nagkanya-kanya na (Everyone did his own thing).”

Reward money

Lacson said that he received reports from police sub-commanders who told him in confidence that the reward money for police operatives who conducted successful drug operations did not reach them, but instead was pocketed by their superiors.

This then prompted enterprising sub-commanders to make their own money, for instance, by using their resourcefulness to find areas where drug dealing was rampant, so that they could connive with one of the drug lords to eliminate his competitor.

Lacson said these scalawags then reported their elimination of the drug lord as an accomplishment in the drug war.

“So this is a ‘special’ special operation,” he said.

Early in the Duterte administration, Lacson said that as chair of the Senate public order and dangerous drugs committee, he was able to hold hearings on the initial drug operations, and one of the testimonies came from a couple in Antipolo whose son was killed in a police operation.

The couple claimed their slain son was a courier of the policemen who had tasked him with selling illegal drugs that had been confiscated in drug raids, according to Lacson.

“So besides the reward money (from the drug operations)… what police officers did, especially the scalawags, was to eliminate those who could possibly testify against them as their couriers,” he said.

Blanket authority

Lacson said these police scalawags somehow felt some protection because then PNP chief Ronald de la Rosa’s “rhetorical statements” gave seemingly “blanket authority” for the police “to shoot on-site drug pushers.”

He said this resulted in the killings of suspected drug pushers, where some police scalawags would at worst even plant evidence against them, such as the case of 16-year-old Kian de los Santos, whom police falsely claimed to be a drug runner.

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Lacson said that the Senate inquiry on De Los Santos, whose killing in August 2017 sparked national outrage, showed that he was not involved in the drug trade and was just framed up by the three policemen who conducted the operation.

Read: 3 policemen guilty of killing Kian delos Santos — court

Self-defense or murder?

On Garma’s testimony that she heard a police sniper was used to kill Tanauan Mayor Antonio Halili while he was attending the City Hall flag ceremony in 2018, he said if a police operative was discerning, he would think this would be an illegal order “because the only justifiable reason to kill a person is self-defense. That’s basic in our Constitution and the criminal justice system.”

Read: Sniper kills mayor linked to drugs

“But if it’s a special operation… then it’s murder because it’s premeditated. There was no threat against the one executing the order, if there was an official order,” Lacson said.

Lacson was surprised to see an old video from September 2019, in which Sen. Bong Go is seen discussing the reward system. In the video, Go says that killing a ninja cop would result in a reward of P1 million; P500,000 if the ninja cop is not killed; while those who fight it out with the cops will receive a P2 million reward if they are killed. The video he saw has been circulating on the internet recently.

“If this was heard by an ordinary policeman—everybody knows Go is very close to the president—even if he basically knows his responsibility and accountability in killing a person, (he) would forget about it,” he said.