Policemen, in general, have acted as officers and gentlemen who serve and protect the people during this pandemic. These frontliners deserve the nation’s thanks.

It is, however, hard to find gallantry or valor in the acts of the few who arrested hungry drivers demanding work, dispersed students who obeyed health rules while peacefully exercising their right to assemble, jailed a fish vendor for weeks, harassed mothers who brought their kids to a park because their city’s guidelines told them it is now okay to do so, dispatched a team to hunt down a salesman who wrote something covered by free speech.

They have, in some way, stained the reputation of an institution whose members have mostly carried out their duties with common sense and compassion.

It is sad that the Good Samaritan work of the overwhelming members of the PNP—those who offered rides to the stranded, gave food to the homeless, provided masks to those without—have, in the eyes of the public, been cancelled by the acts of a few overbearing Centurions in their ranks.

In this time of hardship, the PNP should be one Malasakit Center that is kind to the down-and-out and tough on hardened criminals, and not the other way around.

This is not the time when the arrest of a worker who failed to beat the curfew because he has to walk for hours from work can be a feather in the arresting officer’s cap. Public good and the ends of justice are not served by sending a breadwinner for a minor infraction to jail, where his liberty is delayed by closed courts.

By arresting people for speaking out, the police have amplified the ideas of the people whose actions they suppressed and have unwittingly become the best publicists for their cause.(###)