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By Lakambini A. Sitoy
The 18-year-old walked into the bank. She was
well-dressed and carried a neat handbag, just large enough to
accommodate a sheaf of bills, a bankbook and some vanity items.
Men in police uniforms watched from a vehicle
outside.
As soon as the young woman emerged through the
glass doors, her transaction completed, they moved in. In a calm,
professional manner they told her she was under arrest and drove her
to a police station. They took her to a back room. The police
produced several kilos of methamphetamine hydrochloride.
“We can charge you with drug pushing, drug
trafficking, anything we want,” a policeman informed her. “We
can say we confiscated this shabu you see here from your person.
Your family will be shamed. You could rot in jail your whole
life.”
She was terrified. But with the same evenness,
the policemen handed her an option. She would go free, all
“charges” dropped, if she would pay them P500,000.
Until the money they demanded was in their
hands, she would have to stay “in custody.”
The young woman came from a family of Chinese
Filipino businessmen. In the next few hours, her relatives scrambled
to save her. An aunt finally raised the money and their lawyer
turned it over to the uniformed men.
Robbers in uniform
High-stakes extortion is the latest threat
facing wealthy businessmen and their families. The perpetrators are
policemen or at least wear police uniforms. The victims are often
members of the Chinese Filipino business community, although ethnic
Filipinos of modest means have also been victimized.
“While kidnap-for-ransom has gone down in the
last few months, hulidap [police extortion] incidents are becoming
more frequent,” Citizens Action Against Crime (CAAC) chair, Teresa
Ang See, told The Manila Times.
In street parlance, extortion by policemen is
known as hulidap, a pun on “hold-up,” using huli, the Tagalog
word for “arrest.”
The practice has been going on for years. For
instance, a Court of Appeals case from the American period concerned
two men masquerading as peace officers and threatening to jail an
innocent woman for dealing in black market US Army goods.
But today the sums demanded are unprecedented
and the methods especially ruthless.
“In one case,” said Ang See, “A couple and
their eight-year-old daughter were arrested by men in police
uniforms.”
The men demanded P1.2 million. The father said
he would have to leave the station to raise an amount that high. The
police held the wife and child in detention until he returned.
In another case, a man was arrested along with
his wife. The police threatened to charge them for selling drugs.
This time it was the wife who had to raise the P600,000 the
malefactors demanded, while the man remained confined at the fourth
floor of the station, well away from sight.
Because of their experience in law enforcement,
the perpetrators know how long they can confine their victims
without incurring liability for illegal detention.
If discovered by their superiors, they can also
accuse their victims of bribery and claim that the arrests were part
of legitimate antidrug operations.
Up against the police fraternity
With the appointment last month of Gen. Angelo
Reyes as secretary of the Department of the Interior and Local
Government, a vigorous movement to clean up the ranks of the police
is once again afoot. Reyes has promised an end to kotong (extortion
by traffic enforcers) and hulidap in as little as three months.
“We have been arresting, suspending and filing
cases left and right,” DILG Undersecretary Wencelito Tan Andanar
told The Times.
But Andanar admitted identifying and prosecuting
extortionists in uniform will not be easy, given the tendency of the
police to protect their own.
“The Philippine National Police is one big
fraternity. And there are subfraternities within its ranks,” he
said.
The hermetic nature of the organization
encourages corruption, especially where the assigned checks and
balances are themselves corrupt, or willing to turn a blind eye.
“When policemen go on a raid for drugs, the
process is supposed to be transparent,” Reyes said. “Raids are
supposed to be backed up by mission orders. Sometimes junior-level
officers back up policemen extorting money in the guise of raiding
for drugs.”
Reyes admitted there are huge flaws in the
culture of today’s policemen, many of whom cannot handle the power
conferred by their status.
“It is as if they say, ‘Respect me. I have a
chapa [badge], a gun, a whistle, a nightstick.’ They don’t
realize they are supposed to be servants of the public,” he said.
Despite the difficulties of investigating
extortion cases, arrests have been made.
One recent extortion accusation resulted in the
removal of Supt. Marcelino Pedrozo Jr. from his position as head of
the Western Police District’s Anti-Illegal Drugs Special
Operations Group (DAID-SOG).
The complaint came from a Chinese Filipino
couple who said they had been abducted near the Arranque market in
Manila by policemen aboard a Honda CR-V, a sports utility vehicle.
The policemen allegedly demanded P600,000 from the couple, who were
released later the same day after the money had been paid.
Sources from within the Western Police District
said at least two vehicles used in the crime, including the CR-V
which had been fitted with a license plate belonging to a different
vehicle, were traced to Pedrozo’s office.
Pedrozo has denied he was ever removed, claiming
neither he nor his immediate superior, Chief Supt. Pedro Bulaong,
WPD director, received any such order from PNP Deputy Director
General Edgardo Aglipay in connection with the extortion charges.
Twenty other personnel of the WPD were relieved
in connection with the case.
From the standpoint of an opportunistic law
enforcer, the Western Police District would be a lucrative
assignment. The district embraces Ermita and the Luneta, which
attract vulnerable foreign tourists. It also covers the Binondo
area, where numerous Chinese Filipinos have set up homes and
businesses. It would be a simple matter for a few rogue policemen to
draw on tips supplied by unwitting colleagues or street connections,
in order to monitor the movements of likely victims.
Officials at the WPD deny that hulidap is
institutionalized in their district. Bulaong, WPD director, blames
recent extortion cases on civilians posing as police officers and
belonging to a well-organized syndicate of robbers.
“In July we presented [to the media] two
FX-taxi robbers who wore blue WPD shirts with collars. They were the
same ones who killed a nursing student among the passengers,”
Bulaong said.
Big and small fry
Still, the WPD continues to receive complaints.
It is presently investigating SPO1 Romeo de la Peńa of its Station
5 in the Ermita tourist district for an incident last July.
According to reports reaching the WPD General Assignments Section
(GAS), de la Peńa accosted Enrico Pascual, 34, of Sampaloc, Manila,
for no apparent reason. Pascual said he was brought from Bocobo
Street, Ermita, where he was stopped, to the WPD Station 5, where he
was offered freedom in exchange for a sum of money that the report
did not disclose.
Also in July, SPO1 Angelito Arellano, 44, of the
WPD was charged with detaining and beating up warehouseman Maricel
Velasco and extorting P1,500 from him. Arellano reportedly accosted
Velasco and his wife on Taft Avenue, Manila, as they waited for a
ride at 1 a.m. Arellano reportedly accused him of belonging to a
gang of robbers and brought him to the Rizal Park Police Community
Precinct.
Velasco said that after he was beaten and P1,500
removed from his wallet, he was jailed. His wife was released so she
could raise P30,000 as “bail.” She told her mother, who
contacted the DIID and Napolcom, which set up a sting.
The report said Arellano agreed to receive
P10,000 as payoff at the police community precinct in Rizal Park.
Julian Perlado, 44, a police “informer,” received the money,
which had been marked by investigators, on Arellano’s behalf. Upon
receipt of the money, Arellano, Perlado and another reported
accomplice, Lailanie Manuyag, 29, were arrested. Arellano drew his
gun but was subdued. He now faces charges of unlawful arrest,
serious illegal detention, physical injuries, extortion and
attempted robbery, as well as possible charges for resisting arrest.
Yet efforts to charge, investigate and
discipline abusive policemen have so far caught only the “small
fish,” those demanding payoffs of a few thousand pesos from people
accosted on the street.
Pedrozo, the highest-ranking official implicated
so far, remains with the police force, if not with his district’s
anti-illegal drugs special operations group.
Police no longer trusted
Secretary Reyes and Undersecretary Andanar of
the DILG both stress the need for victims to come forward and
testify.
“The police in general want to do a good
job,” Reyes told The Times. “But sometimes we don’t allow them
to. The failure to report a crime is the first major problem.”
The Chinese Filipinos whose ordeals were
described above refused to have their names published. Requests for
interviews through the Federation of Filipino Chinese Chambers of
Commerce were not entertained.
But fear of damage to their reputation and to
the goodwill associated with their businesses effectively silences
the victims.
Also, public confidence in the police forces is
so low that victims don’t know whom to complain to or whether
reporting will only invite reprisals.
“Definitely businessmen can lose trust in the
police if this goes on. At least one who was victimized twice has
gone abroad. He has stopped going to work. He and his family have
packed their bags and left the country,” Ang See said in a recent
radio interview.
“This is similar to the exodus of Chinese
Filipinos who fell prey to kidnappers several years back,” she
said.
Though “kidnap-for-ransom” cases have
declined this year and hulidap cases have resurged, there is no
evidence to show that both crimes are perpetrated by the same
persons or crime syndicates.
From the point of view of a criminal, however,
hulidap would be the less hazardous undertaking. While
kidnap-for-ransom is a capital offense, punishable by death, hulidap
is technically robbery committed by means of intimidation, which
carries a maximum penalty of 10 years.
Kidnappers must be able to maintain a hideaway
for days or weeks, own firearms and vehicles and maintain a huge
payroll for contacts and gang members.
But rogue hulidap policemen take advantage of an
existing information network, employ the premises of a police
station without the knowledge of their colleagues and use their
power to write a nonexistent crime into a blotter to instill fear
and demand cooperation.
In some cases, a payoff is no guarantee that the
victim will be released, and reporting may prove to be hazardous.
The 18-year-old Chinese Filipino woman falsely
accused of selling shabu remains in jail. The policemen filed
charges against her—because instead of keeping silent she told her
story to the Citizens’ Action Against Crime.
According to Ang See, her family’s lawyer is
ready to testify that he was the one who brought the money to the
rogue policemen. The teller at the bank that the young woman visited
just minutes before her arrest is ready to say the bag she was
carrying was too small to hold the kilos of shabu that were
supposedly seized from her.
But the judicial process is glacial and with the
legal presumption that a public officer is performing his duty
during an arrest, on top of the fraternal tendency among cops to
protect their own, it is not known how long she will remain behind
bars for a crime she didn’t commit.
--With Jonathan Vicente
Hulidap’ victim Patrick
Garcia presses his case
By Ronnie E. Calumpita
, Correspondent
One of the more high-profile hulidap cases
involved the young actor Patrick Garcia.
Garcia, 22, has filed robbery and extortion
charges against a rookie policeman and his senior assigned to the
Police Community Precinct 5 of the Central Police District Station
2.
Anytime this week it will be known if the
charges against Police Officer 1 Sofjan Soriano and Police Officer 2
John Sapad would reach the courts.
“I’ve already submitted the case for
resolution,” Assistant City Prosecutor Rowena de Juan-Guinagoran,
who handled the preliminary investigation of the case, said. She
declined to disclose her recommendations in the findings she
submitted early July.
Guinogaran said she would have resolved the case
much earlier had respondents Soriano and Sapad did not file a motion
on April 16 to reopen the preliminary investigation.
The officers also want Guinagoran to admit their
counteraffidavit through the motion.
The counteraffidavit reiterates the denial of
Soriano and Sapad that they demanded P200,000 from Garcia to hasten
his release. The officers also denied poking their guns at the actor
and handcuffing him and his companion, Andrew Lopez, 19.
The two also denied accompanying Garcia to a
bank with an ATM to withdraw the amount.
The officers did not admit they brought Garcia
and Lopez to PCP-5 on Visayas Avenue corner Forestry Street in the
early morning of January 21, 2004.
They said they went to Visayas Avenue to check a
report about a drug deal and chanced upon a maroon Ford Expedition
bearing Garcia and Lopez.
Brothers Allen and Sammy Flordeliz,
acquaintances of Garcia who live nearby, later arrived and
intervened, questioning the authority of Soriano and Sapad.
The policemen said they searched the Flordelizes
and found a sachet of methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu on
their possession.
Garcia, Lopez and the Flordelizes were brought
to PCP5-5 and transferred to CPD-Station 2 in Baler.
Soriano and Sapad denied they put Garcia and
Lopez behind bars. They alleged that the actor and his companion
were not immediately released because the policemen had to wait for
the go-signal from Insp. Herman Peralta, the precinct commander.
Garcia’s version
Garcia and Lopez gave a different story. They
said they had just come from the house of the Flordelizes, where
Garcia had returned a cell phone Allen left in the actor’s house
in Mandaluyong City. They were stopped by at least seven policemen
in plainclothes. Soriano and Sapad were among them.
“They pointed their guns at us and we were
made to get off the car and were searched by PO1 Soriano and PO2
Sapad, while the rest of them searched our vehicle,” Garcia said
in his affidavit.
He said the police officers threatened to
contact the media and fabricate a story that he was detained for
illegal possession of prohibited drugs, if he did not give them
P200,000.
When Garcia refused the policemen cuffed him,
Lopez and the Flordeliz brothers and brought them to PCP-5.
Garcia’s group was placed in a cell, but after
a few minutes, Garcia and Lopez were let out. Accompanied by Soriano,
the actor withdrew P20,000 from a teller machine along Visayas
Avenue.
Soriano demanded more, saying there were many of
them dividing the money.
On the way back to the precinct, Garcia asked
for his cell phone, saying he will call someone who could help him
produce the additional amount. Soriano agreed.
Garcia was talking to a certain Christopher
Dinio when Soriano grabbed the phone from him, sensing he was asking
for help. Soriano stepped on the accelerator but Garcia quickly
stepped on the brakes and got out of the car shouting “holdup.”
A motorist pulled alongside but sped off when
Soriano fired a warning shot and introduced himself as a police
officer.
Garcia was taken back to the precinct and was
later released along with Lopez. Garcia said the policemen might
have been forced to release them because the situation was getting
out of hand.
“Then they called up a certain Inspector
‘Puti’ Peralta who arrived minutes later. We were told to
narrate what happened and then were released after I told him that I
want to go home because it’s been four hours or so since we were
detained,” Garcia said.
The actor’s family was silent about the
incident until several tabloids reported that he was arrested on
drug charges. They decided to file the complaint against Soriano and
Sapad to clear the actor’s name.
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