By Christopher Lloyd Caliwan/Philippine News Agency
MANILA — The Philippine National Police (PNP) will revise its policy on the arrest of wanted persons to be able to meet the requirements in capturing high-value criminals.
This came after the Commission on Audit (COA) said the PNP fell short of its target number of arrests of wanted persons last year.
Brig. Gen. Omega Jireh Fidel, PNP Directorate for Investigation and Detective Management (DIDM) deputy director, explained that they are meeting their target and that they just have to align their parameters on arresting wanted persons.
While there are police stations that do not have wanted persons in their area of jurisdiction, Fidel said these are still required to make arrests based on their parameters.
“We are guided by the parameters for 10 most wanted persons. Stations or all units are required to arrest one per month and for the ordinary wanted person. They have required all stations to arrest at least 5 percent of their wanted persons. And for 2018, our target is 22,000 and we only arrested 4,700 top 10 most wanted. The problem is regardless of the station, we know that those in island municipalities, they do not have wanted persons. Some of them don’t even have crime incidents in their areas,” he told reporters in a press briefing Monday.
“What we do is we revise the policy for the serving of warrants of arrest. As for the 5 percent target per station, we have exceeded our target. Actually, we tripled our targets for 2018,” he added.
Fidel said they have yet to explain the matter to COA to avoid further misconceptions.
For his part, PNP chief Gen. Oscar Albayalde echoed the DIDM’s statement, saying the police are not falling short of arrest targets.
“We have to explain it to COA because it appears that we are falling short on the arrest of wanted persons. We did not fall short on the arrest of wanted persons. In fact, triple according to the data of DIDM, we exceeded our target in terms of the number of wanted persons we have arrested,” Albayalde told reporters when sought for a comment.
In its 2018 audit report, COA said the PNP only reached 19.37 percent of its 51.57 percentage target in arresting wanted persons.
It said the PNP also reached only 34.70 percent of its 60 percent target when it comes to arresting wanted persons within 30 days upon the receipt of the arrest warrant.
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