Cop-out
The police have changed tack on the Jonas Burgos mystery, and unfortunately for the missing activist and all those who hope to see his abductors brought to justice, the police have moved in the direction first tracked by the military. Now the police see communist rebels, and only communist rebels, as responsible for the crime.We have serious reservations about the new witnesses presented by the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), however. Many of these concern the implausibility of the military’s claims, but the most significant doubts arise from what went before these witnesses were presented.
Military sources that journalists have relied on for years have sworn that a unit of either the Intelligence Service of the AFP or of the 56th Infantry Battalion based in Bulacan were involved in the abduction. A state prosecutor has asserted that six soldiers were behind the disappearance, a claim that earned him the justice secretary’s displeasure. And ever since Burgos was forcibly seized in a mall last April, the leadership of the AFP has acted in a less-than-forthright, suspicion-inducing manner: stonewalling, finding excuses not to appear before the courts, refusing to turn over the results of internal investigations.
For these and other reasons, we find the military’s most recent version of events suspect. Unfortunately, the police now share that interpretation. And they have brought to it their own worst practices.
Let us, using the most recent statements of Senior Supt. Joel Coronel of the Criminal Investigation Detection Group, consider only two of these fatal flaws.
First, an almost total dependence on eyewitness testimony.
Coronel is well within his rights to judge the testimony of Emerito Lipio, a member of the New People’s Army, as providing the most “logical and coherent” picture of the Burgos abduction. That is his lookout. But his complete reliance on Lipio’s belated testimony illustrates the weakness of many, if not most, of the cases our police officers investigate.
They are, most of them, based on the say-so of someone or other. For that very reason, many of them do not prosper in court—the testimonies are eminently recantable.
To be sure, in the Burgos disappearance, Coronel speaks of a pattern he sees in the testimony of other witnesses. “[Lipio’s] statements are consistent with what other witnesses have told us before.”
But his case, as he makes it, depends entirely on these witnesses. He excludes such evidence as the license plates of the Toyota Revo used in abducting Burgos from the mall, which have been traced back to the impounding area inside the headquarters of the 56 IB in Norzagaray, Bulacan. (Why? They, too, were pointed out by eyewitnesses.)
This brings us to the second worst practice. Coronel’s statements remind us, yet again, that the police sometimes have the habit of disregarding the evidence that is right before their eyes.
Coronel, for example, said he found the alleged connection between the controversial license plates and military involvement in the Burgos abduction “really puzzling.”
Now that’s a puzzlement. By any reasonable standard, the fact -- and it’s a fact -- that the plates on an abductor’s vehicle were traced back to a battalion HQ should be considered to mean that a prima facie case does exist to investigate the possible involvement of battalion officers or men in the abduction.
Unfortunately, it would take enormous self-confidence and political will on the part of the police to say that. Thus, the cop-out: Police officers who now choose to give credence only to those witnesses whose testimony favors the military.
