Gov's top cop

LOUD AND CLEAR so was heard the renewed call of Gov. Eddie T. Panlilio for the relief of Pampanga police director Senior Supt. Keith Ernald Singian, in the wake of January 5’s siege of the capitol by protesting truckers joined in by the long-picketing quarrymen of the Biyaya a Luluguran at Sisikapan (Balas).
“Inept and incompetent” Panlilio called the local police for their failure to contain the truckers and Balas boys within the perimeters of the Arnedo Park; the protester’s storming the capitol the governor deemed as direct threat to his life and that of his provincial administrator; the mauling of his nephews a direct assault on the freedom of expression (?), and promptly demanded – not so much on a silver platter but on a tiklis (a very large basket) as they are many – for the heads of Singian, City of San Fernando police chief Supt. Benjamin Medina, and the whole police force posted at the capitol that Monday.
Panlilio’s call, to repeat, was heard loud and clear: a 10-4 that was immediately taken not so much by those to whom it was addressed though – President GMA, Interior and Local Government Secretary Ronnie Puno and PNP chief Director General Jesus Verzosa – as by some police officers long salivating for Singian’s post. An opening gambit there, Panlilio most fortuitously provided them.
Our sources, deeply embedded in both Camps Crame and Olivas, say the jockeying for Singian’s post has started with the pretenders already moving about through the PNP woodwork, going the rounds of influential religious sects and pastors for some endorsement, and getting more up close and personal with the chums of somebody named Mikey. Not Disney’s mouse, dummy.
The earliest birds – so our sources say – are Senior Superintendents George Gaddi and Sonny Cunanan.
Gaddi and Cunanan shared common ground as erstwhile police directors of the City of Angeles. Where Cunanan’s term at Camp Tomas Pepito came to full maturity, Gaddi’s though was stillborn, aborted on its sixth month.
“He did not even make casual, were he a government employee,” so the joke on Gaddi went in the city after his unceremonious dismissal consequent to an overkill of a raid on the office of the local franchisee of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office’s Small Town Lottery (lotto).
The raiders in their full battle gear made like they were engaging the Abu Sayyaf, terrifying enough for one pregnant lotto employee to have her contractions and suffered a miscarriage. So the news reports then carried.
Of course, Gaddi was acting on orders of Mayor Francis “Blueboy” Nepomuceno who decreed that the lotto was illegal and even vowed to fight the “vice” to the finish.
Gaddi was finished. Nepomuceno is still mayor. The lotto is still thriving. So what happened to the fight, eh, Mister Blue? A P4-million question there, to paraphrase a cliché.
Cunanan’s watch on the other hand saw the proliferation of video-karera (VK) in the city, with the coming of a new VK lord in the person of one “Louie Boy” taking over the operations of the dreaded “3SM” gang that monopolized the game at the time of Cunanan’s predecessor, what’s-his-name Segubre.
These are the guys obsessing for the Pampanga police directorship? And, while writing this, Senior Supt. Pierre Bucsit, current Angeles City chief, too?
They most surely would not even come a quarter of the lofty qualification standards set by the Reverend Governor. As a matter of course, not one candidate already nominated or yet to be nominated by the PNP – whether Crame or Olivas – will ever pass Panlilio’s measurement weighted in moral values.
The governor has long ago set his heart, mind, and possibly, even his soul, on only one choice for Pampanga police director – Senior Supt. Cesar Hawthorne Binag, who made his mark as head of the PNP Moral Recovery Program.
If only to show the efficacy, if not the sanctity of his choice – so I already wrote here once – Panlilio enlisted the endorsement of Binag by no less than 30 bishops. I said then and I am saying it again: Having the imprimatur of that number of holy men warrants for Binag not only the Pampanga police directorship but the director-generalship of the whole PNP itself. No PNP chief has ever received that much endorsement from the prelates.
If Singian must go – he’s practically overstaying as officer-in-charge of the Pampanga police office for over two years already – then, by all means, let Panlilio get his choice.
So the next time the capitol is stormed a la Bastille by the Balas, the truckers, and whoever takes his right to free expression out of Arnedo Park, Panlilio would not have anyone else to blame.
Go Binag, Gov.