MAINTENANCE of peace and order under the implementation of the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine is being assured by the Police Regional Office Cordillera (PRO-COR).

Brigadier General R’win Pagkalinawan, PRO-COR director, said the assurance in line with directives from Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief General Archie Gamboa for all regional commands in the country to continue with the peace and order initiatives despite the threat of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19).

“The Chief PNP wants to assure the people that PNP is under control of the criminal situation. There is no crime happening whatsoever in NCR which means that nationwide this should be the case. Here in our region, we have deployed more personnel like for Baguio alone, we deployed 48 personnel coming from the Regional Mobile Force Command-14 and another 48 personnel at La Trinidad and we want to make sure that all food warehouses and grocery stores in the region are assigned with our troops,” Pagkalinawan said.

Although residents in the region have experienced confusion in the implementation of the enhanced community quarantine, Pagkalinawan said with the right information received by the public coming from officials sources, the situation is contained.

“We acknowledge that there have been confusions on the first day of implementation of the enhanced community quarantine because many were not informed but we were able to resolve this immediately after the next day. In Baguio alone, the situation was contained because everybody was well informed because it was only on the first day which was confusing, it was one way for everybody to learn and to find out what is happening because this is part of the process because nobody has experienced this and this is the first time for us to experience this worldwide phenomenon or pandemic and we are learning from this,” the regional director stated.

Pagkalinawan pointed to the need for more police visibility to assure the people there is crimes happening in the Cordillera to give the people nothing to fear.