Senator Juan Edgardo “Sonny” Angara on Friday urged President Benigno Aquino III to announce in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) a massive police recruitment program to beef up the country’s national police force.
Angara said that in order to fight the increasing crime incidents in the country, the government should “put more boots on the ground” by hiring at least 50,000 policemen to augment the Philippine National Police (PNP) force by at least 200,000 cops and improve the cop-to-population ratio to one per 500 people which is the ideal.
In fact, Angara said, the ideal police-population ratio “is not an option but a mandate of law, Republic Act 6975, the 1989 law creating the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG).”
But a quarter of a century since it was passed, the policeman-to-population ratio, which on paper currently stands at one per 675, has never been achieved, the senator pointed out.
“If I may give an unsolicited advice, I think the President should announce a massive policemen recruitment program in his second-to-the-last SONA,” Angara said.
With a current population of 100 million, the senator said the country needs about 200,000 policemen, but the authorized “uniformed personnel ceiling” of the PNP is only around 151,410.
“Filling all of these, plus adding more should be part of the last two years agenda of the Aquino administration,” he said.
“It will send a comforting message to the nation that more men are being suited up to roll back crime,” the neophyte senator said.
He said Aquino’s SONA announcement could be followed through with a request for Congress to approve funds that can be used for the hiring of rookies in the 2015 national budget.
Angara suggested that 25,000 policemen be hired in 2015 and the same number in 2016.
"The initial cost of hiring 25,000 new cops, assuming they will join the service in the second half of the year, is about P5 billion," Angara said.
While there is inevitably going to be a question of funding, the senator said the government can make use of the pork barrel funds of the senators that was scrapped in the 2014 national budget which is at P3.2-billion.
Citing police data, Angara said there were only 1,033,833 reported to the police last year which he said, could just be a fraction of the total as more victims prefer not to report crime matters to police.
The senator lamented that this may be due to persistent doubts on the ability of law enforcement personnel to catch the culprits.
“Understated the data may be, it still paints a scary picture: One is murdered every hour, a robbery is committed every 10 minutes, someone is raped every 72 minutes, a theft is happening every three and half minutes,” he said.
Other countries, particularly ASEAN neighbors, in contrast “are fielding more policemen.”
“Thailand has one for every 304 persons; Indonesia, one per 428; Malaysia, one per 267," he said.
Angara said the current Philippine ratio of one policeman to 675 population does not translate to the actual number of cops on duty at any given time.
Angara also said that aside from hiring more policemen, the PNP can maximize its force by removing police officers from their desks, and handing over administrative duties to non-uniformed personnel (NUP).
source: Yahoo!
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