THE Philippine National Police (PNP) wants to try other approaches such as conducting dialogues and sports activities in dealing with the alleged recruitment by communist rebels in colleges and universities, PNP Chief Oscar Albayalde said on Tuesday, August 27.
Albayalde said that aside from insisting on allowing police and military personnel to enter school and university premises, they will try “softer” approaches such as engaging students in dialogues and sports activities to keep them from being recruited by Leftist groups.
“Upon mutual agreement with, and acceptable to school authorities, we want to engage our students on ensuring public safety which are the mandated duties of the police,” he said.
“We only have the best interest of the youth backing our pure good intention to establish police presence in schools against crime, exploitation and abuse,” he added.
Albayalde made the statement following a meeting with Commission on Higher of Education Chairman Prospero de Vera, University of the Philippines President Danilo Concepcion and members of the UP Board of Regents, Polytechnic University of the Philippines President Emmanuel De Guzman, and representatives from the Ateneo de Manila University and Dela Salle University.
He said the meeting is the first of a series of consultations on how the police and the military would effectively engage students amid reports of communist rebel recruitment.
“We are thankful to the officials of the academe for enlightening us on academic freedom and how we can best serve the students and the academic community,” said Albayalde.
“We hope that today’s meeting will usher a series of dialogues and consultation to explore common ground where government and the academe can fulfill its respective mandates,” he added.
For his part, De Vera said the first thing they have to work on in order to establish a good working relationship between the government security forces and the academe is to identify common protocols to avoid misunderstanding, particularly in dealing with the University of the Philippines.
Earlier, UP students conducted a protest action to condemn the proposal of allowing police and military officials to conduct patrolling inside their premises amid concerns of recruitment of the communist rebels among the
“What do you mean by common protocols? It can be as basic as information-sharing kasi ngayon kung talagang hindi kayo nag uusap, wala kayong agreement,” said De Vera.
“The UP police does not have information on the crime situation, drug situation inside the campus because they don't have the capability to do that. The PNP has better capability to do that,” he added.
Albayalde, however, reiterated that they only have the best intention for the students and other members of the academe.
“For our part in the security sector, PNP seeks to build stronger collaboration among stakeholders employing the whole of nation approach and protect campuses against criminal activities, drug syndicates, and shadowy organizations that promote and espouse Local Communist Armed Conflict against government through force and violence,” he said.
“We assure the public and the academe community that we will do our best to fulfill our sworn duty, to serve and protect,” he added.
Meanwhile, De Vera blamed the media for the misinterpretation of security officials’ statements on student activism and communist rebels.
“I think a lot of the media hype attached to this is because sometimes we use very loosely a lot of words that generate conflict rather than generate agreement like the word militarization. Anything that has got something to do with the security sector is automatically labeled militarization,” he said. (SunStar Philippines)