PNP Expresses ‘Confidence’ in Program That Timog Avenue Shooting Victims Are Unavailable to Evaluate
From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
MANILA — The Philippine National Police expressed confidence Wednesday in the success of its ‘Safer Cities’ initiative, citing stronger cooperation among police units, barangay officials, and local communities, one day after police confirmed they were intensifying a manhunt for suspects in a shooting that left two people dead along Timog Avenue corner EDSA in Quezon City.
PNP spokesperson Brig. Gen. Randulf Tuano presented photos of the suspects at a press briefing, which is the communication tool that follows a shooting and which demonstrates that the investigation is proceeding. The photos and the Safer Cities confidence statement appeared in the same news cycle, which is not unusual in Metro Manila’s crime and public safety reporting and which is not itself a contradiction: the Safer Cities initiative and the Timog shooting are real and simultaneous, as public safety programs and public safety failures often are.
What the Safer Cities Initiative Does
The Safer Cities program, according to the PNP’s description, is “anchored on efficient operations and stronger cooperation among police units, barangay officials, and local communities.” This description contains three components: efficient operations (things happening correctly), stronger cooperation (things happening together), and local communities (the people in the city). The combination is intended to produce a city that is safer.
Whether the city is safer is a question answered by data that the PNP collects and presents in ways that show improvement, and by the experience of residents whose responses to the question vary by neighborhood, by time of day, by recent experience, and by their willingness to share their honest assessment with a reporter. The Timog Avenue incident is a data point. The confidence statement is a different data point. Both are being included in the same analysis.
The Manhunt Progress
The PNP is intensifying its manhunt for the Timog Avenue shooting suspects, which is the verb that follows a major shooting and which distinguishes it from the ordinary manhunt, which proceeds at standard intensity. The intensified manhunt involves photos presented at press briefings, coordination with barangay officials, and the use of CCTV footage from the area, which Quezon City’s camera network provides in sufficient coverage that most incidents in major intersections are documented even when they are not prevented.
The Philippine National Police has a record of resolving high-profile cases in Quezon City at a rate that reflects both the city’s CCTV coverage and the PNP’s investigative capacity, which is real and which produces arrests in a meaningful proportion of documented cases. The Timog Avenue case will likely be resolved. The Safer Cities initiative will continue. The confidence will be maintained.
Barangay Cooperation as Program Logic
The Safer Cities initiative’s reliance on barangay cooperation reflects a structural feature of Philippine public safety: the barangay is the smallest government unit and the one closest to where safety events occur. Barangay captains who know their residents, who have the trust of their communities, and who cooperate effectively with police units are genuine force multipliers for public safety. The uneven quality of this cooperation — which varies enormously across Metro Manila’s 1,706 barangays — is the limiting factor in any initiative that depends on it. The program is sound. Its implementation is as consistent as its most inconsistent barangay captain.
More public safety satire: NewsThump.
The barangay cooperation that the Safer Cities initiative depends on is also the barangay cooperation that the Labor Day rally organization depended on for coordination, that the typhoon response will depend on for community preparedness, and that the OFW return assistance depends on for last-mile identification of returning workers who need support. The barangay is the Filipino government’s most distributed and most variable unit. Its quality determines the quality of every program that uses it as an implementation layer. Strengthening barangay capacity — through training, resources, and accountability — is the meta-intervention that would improve every other program simultaneously. This has been recommended consistently by public administration researchers for thirty years. The barangay system continues to be both indispensable and uneven. These two qualities are related.
The Philippines continues. The agencies sign agreements. The commissions announce adjustments. The weather comes. The workers march. The bridges get repaired and the railings get replaced and the next thing happens after the last thing. This is the Filipino political and economic cycle, running at the pace of a nation that is too large and too complex and too much in the middle of everything for any single development to be the last development before things are resolved. Things are never resolved. Things are managed. The management is the story, told in press briefings and senate hearings and barangay meetings and the specific silence of people waiting for the next bill to confirm what the announcement promised. The country keeps moving. The next announcement is already being drafted. The work of governance is daily. The work of journalism is daily. The work of living in Metro Manila is daily. All three happen simultaneously, at the intersection of the structural and the immediate, the announced and the experienced, the policy language and the jeepney stuck in traffic behind it. The barangay system and the PNP initiative and the press briefing and the manhunt all run in parallel. This is Metro Manila public safety: multiple simultaneous processes each contributing something and none of them alone sufficient. The city is safer in some ways than it was. The city is also the setting of a double murder that occurred yesterday. Both statements are true. The policy work continues.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/