Like any police office, the PCR is composed of cops. But instead of going out in the streets to hunt for snatchers, PCR cops visit crime-prone communities and wear stupid Santa hats during Christmas, bringing gifts to little rugby boys and girls, who will eventually grow up to become big rugby boys and girls.

But I will not digress. As I was saying, the public has a general distrust for police, and only man’s ability to think twice is preventing civilians from attacking policemen whenever they meet in the street. But when it’s a bird that attacks cops, something about the country’s police profession must have gone terribly wrong. You must really suck at your job if you are hated by not just humans but also cassowaries, turkeys, ostriches, hens, roosters, ducks, geese, golden pheasants, common pheasants and other poultry animals.

The news over the weekend said four policemen in Zamboanga City suffered injuries after they were attacked by a cassowary at the training field of the Philippine National Police Regional Training School. A police official in the region said the four cops were attacked “one after another” and were “no match for the cassowary.”

Meaning, while the angry bird was pummeling one policeman, the other three were so busy wondering what a “cassowary” is to mount a counterattack.

One policeman: “Aaaaarghhh. Help! Help! I’m being attacked by a bird called cassowary!” The other three policemen: “Casso what?” Since there were four cops in the incident, the scene was acted out four times, with some modified lines like “Aaaargh! Get a dictionary, quick!”

So while the cassowary was beating one policeman after the other, the poor cops learned that “the cassowary is a very large flightless bird native to the tropical forests of New Guinea, nearby islands and northeastern Australia. The Southern Cassowary is the third tallest and second heaviest living bird, smaller only than the ostrich and emu.”

Before the cops could start wondering what an emu is, the cassowary hopped back to its nest in a nearby aviary and gave high fives to fellow cassowaries.

In fairness to our beloved police, the Zamboanga incident wasn’t the first recorded cassowary attack on uniformed men. My intensive research showed cassowaries have a reputation for being dangerous to the military too. In fact, during World War II, American and Australian troops stationed in New Guinea were warned to steer clear of them. They can disembowel a trooper with one kick, my research said.

Engr. Rene dela Cruz, head of Zamboanga City’s General Service Office and in-charge of the aviary, said “the bird seems to be angry with people in uniform and we are still wondering why.”

The PNP is at a loss on how to deal with this latest threat. It doesn’t have a Police Birds Relations office. Its men are not trained to run after criminal birds. Should they handcuff them? Would the Miranda Doctrine apply?

Policeman: “Duck, you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

Duck: “Quack!”

And who’s the “innocent?” Every one of those lined up before the cameras, handcuffed, wearing an orange shirt with the word “detainee” on it, and with a piece of cardboard hanging around his neck bearing his name and his supposed crime. Why not get it done with by including the names of the suspect’s family and friends as well? Because that’s practically what the police are doing, shaming an entire network of friends and lovers even before any case could be filed in court.

Mr. Police Superintendent tells media: We now have suspects, plenty of them. Case closed.

And while we’re at it, this is another strange thing about police investigations. They consider a case closed once they have suspects. Case closed at the police level, now it’s for the court to close it at the judiciary level? Like that? Should the barangay tanods who chased the suspects out of their Tanduay-laden breath declare the case closed at their level too?

Well, for your information, I was the concerned citizen who reported the crime to the barangay captain. I should consider the case solved at my own, very personal, private, confidential, hush-hush, clandestine, domestic, beware-of-dogs, bachelor-for-life level too.

It’s one and the same freaking case, for Christ’s sake, from the commission of the crime, to the arrest of suspects, to the filing of charges in court, to the murder of the eyewitness, to the escape from prison of the guilty party. It can only be solved once and by everybody together doing a group hug.

Going back, I said there’s something wrong with the way the police present suspects to the media. For one, isn’t there any police officer with a better handwriting these days? We understand not all of us know what a computer printout is, especially if we live in typewriter-era police dugouts. But the police can at least use clean cartolina instead of cardboard ripped from a commercial box that says “Recommended by Dentists” in one corner.

For example, if my family has got me arrested for spending my entire month’s salary on beer, I wouldn’t want to appear in the next day’s papers with this cardboard dangling around my neck that says, “Lorenzo P. Niñal, Denounced by Own Family for Drunkenness, One Store Has it All.”

I mean, sir, I know you’re not judging me guilty before the media (although that’s what you’re doing), but this treatment I’m getting says otherwise. Look, you didn’t even give me the chance to clean up this bloody face I got here after your overzealous tanods smashed it against the hood of the patrol car. Promise, I will tell the media I tripped in the CR back at my cell and crashed my face against the toilet bowl, but at least let me look cute on camera for my ailing mother.

What do you want to accomplish from all this, really? “Hey, dear public, I’m your police officer, I’ve smashed the hell out of this hobo here, sent two and a half of his front teeth flying, broken his nose, dislocated his jaw, ripped his skull open, plucked his eyes for dinner, so that you will all live in peace.”

But he is still a suspect, Mr. Police Officer, technically an innocent man. “Yeah, just imagine what I’ll do to a technically guilty man.”

You see, there’s actually no arguing with the police. The best thing a suspect can do in this situation is hold his head up before the camera like he’s really innocent then say ‘cheese.’

SUN.STAR CEBU, OCT. 21, 2008

I don’t know of any cosmic connection between police work and places with strange names, but none of the emails I received came from friends in Panorama City, Los Angeles or Utopia, Texas. It’s always Intercourse, Pennsylvania; Condom, France; Batman, Turkey; Hornytown, North Carolina; or Satan’s Kingdom, Vermont. But wait. The more you run through the list, the more you actually see the connection. Go figure.

To digress further, if you want to receive emails from practically anywhere in the world regarding police work, try writing an article about nightsticks and have some newspaper publish it online with your email address at the bottom, like what this paper does. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Back to the topic. Many of the letter senders are particularly concerned about overweight policemen. One asked me to check out a news item online about solving the obesity problem in the police service and suggested that our officials consider replicating the program here. The article was about paying fat cops to trim down.

It’s true. It’s actually not hard to imagine a police official telling his subordinates: “Since no dietary program works for you fat, ugly, beer-guzzling goliaths, we’ll try this one. I’ll buy those excess fats. How about that?”  Policemen: “Yeah!”

If you still think I’m making this up, the place is in Mexico. Residents of the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes woke up one morning to find the streets teeming with cops the size of Mexico’s Eschrichtius robustus, which is Latin for “cops as huge as gray whales”. After much finger-pointing, City officials agreed that the ones responsible for the gigantic problem were sugary soft drinks and fatty hamburgers, which, according to the report, were increasingly becoming part of the national diet.

Alarmed that the problem had literally grown out of proportion, and annoyed by the cop-gray whale analogy, the officials scrambled for possible solutions. Proposals to ban soft drinks and hamburgers were promptly shot down because you can’t touch something that is fast becoming part of national diet. Forget liposuction too because it is counterproductive. It doesn’t require effort on the part of the policemen to sweat out for money.

The plan most favored by the officials was to pay each fat cop 100 pesos for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) that he loses. At the current exchange rate of $1 to 10.56 MXN (Mexican peso), that’s about $9.47 per kilogram. If we convert that to Philippine peso (at the current exchange rate of $1 to P41.65), that’s about P394.47 for every kilogram, or P179.30 per pound of slimy fat.

That means a cop with, say, five excess pounds can already earn P896.50. And because the PNP is generous to its personnel, we can round it off to P1,000 for every five pounds. The fatter you go, the more money you make. And considering how easy it is to gain back weight, that’s big business for our cops, especially those whose wives or husbands, and children are cops too.

If it is done in Mexico, it can be done here in the Philippines, too. There’s always more than just boxing between these two countries.

Before the Jose de Venecia ouster and the Rodolfo ‘Jun’ Lozada Jr. expose, there was a more compelling issue that sadly slipped the public’s mind. I’m referring to a PNP memorandum entitled: “The Revival of Baton in the Maintenance of Peace and Order in the Philippines,” with its enlightening sub-head, “Maintaining the Country’s Peace and Order through the Revival of the Baton.”

By using the word “revival,” the memo rightly suggests that the baton is dead, so it has to be “revived,” or as the dictionary puts it, “to become popular once more because the baton is not actually a sissy weapon like the whistle.”

The PNP organization, upon the recommendation of the Baton and Other Friendly Weapons Bureau, issued the memo after high-end peace-keeping weapons, like assault rifles and grenade launchers, failed to annihilate snatchers, peeping toms and other top level criminals. Also, the Baton Bureau was alarmed after learning that the Center for Funny Props in Philippine Cinema listed the baton as the most successful come-on in Dolphy and Joey Marquez movies.

But let’s digress. Tell me honestly, don’t you find the word “batuta” funny? It tops my list of funny words along with “spatula,” “ju-jitsu” and “nipple.”

Anyway. “The baton is a sacred weapon that should be rescued from the ignominy of showbiz!,” the memo read, in what appears to be one of those rare occasions when an official document actually uses an exclamation point.

The memo includes a primer on the baton for the post Edsa generation (where most of today’s snatchers and peeping toms belong) who understands the baton as a stick tasseled at both ends that a majorette in a high school marching band twirls around when she’s not doing it in a talent portion of a beauty pageant.

The memo’s primer read: “A baton (from bâton, the French for stick) or truncheon (nightstick in American English) is essentially a stick of less than arms-length, usually made of wood, plastic, or metal, and carried by law enforcement, corrections, security, and military personnel for less-lethal self-defense and to disperse combative, non-compliant subjects.”

A standard baton is approximately one and a quarter inches in diameter and from 18 to 36 inches long. A few inches longer and it’s a baseball bat; a few inches shorter and it’s a dildo. You can just imagine the great deal of caution wood carvers exercise in producing a single baton so it will serve its intended purpose.

The operative phrase in the memo is “less-lethal defense.” Meaning, a baton is to be used in a situation where a surface-to-surface missile is inappropriate and a pepper spray is insufficient.

But a policeman couldn’t just hit a non-compliant subject anywhere. The memo includes a list of body parts a policeman should avoid hitting: head, neck, face, eyebrows, moustache, fingernails, the liver, the small intestine and the esophagus. The rest, like the teeth and kneecaps, are safe.

There’s actually an orthopedic condition called Nightstick Fracture, which is a fracture of the ulna, so called because it’s the kind of injury that results when attempting to block the downward blow of a nightstick with the raised forearm. But we’re running out of space. So, for the medical connection between orthopedics and the country’s peace and order, type “batuta + boner + equipment” and click search.

(sun.star, february 19, 2008)

Here’s something our city government should consider: http://cops-so-fat-they-can’t-see-their-weewees

Made as basis for the order was a study done by the PNP’s Department of Yuletide Criminal Behavior, an agency so top secret that it doesn’t exist. It says that in the weeks covering the Christmas season, criminals acting like children also act like bulls in their attraction to the color red. The only difference is that unlike that of a bull’s, a criminal’s attraction to red is friendly.

The theory makes sense, considering that red is the official color of Christmas and cows figure prominently in the Nativity Scene. The study – marked “confidential” and kept in a secret vault in Camp Crame – is titled, “The Cop As Santa Claus: An Idea So Funny That It Deserves A Try.”

Real life experience supports the memorandum too. Christmas traditions prevent us from thinking ill of Santa. How can you not love this rotund figure in fur-trimmed garments bringing a bag of goodies, who introduced us to sleighs and chimneys that we don’t have here anyway, and who makes millions of break-ins in a single night all for the love of children? Santa melts the heart. And our love for him is so strong that we extend it to whoever wears a Santa outfit.

That’s why in various places simultaneously, Santa is pulling Christmas robberies left and right. In one convenience store in the US, Santa did it by just aiming a gun at the cashier and yelling “HO HO HO.” The cashier was reportedly heard saying, “Santa, no need for the gun. Here’s the money and make all the world’s children happy.”

Other forms of robberies pulled by Santa have been reported all around the world. And most of these robberies met the least resistance from the victims, so that they were no longer considered robberies but making rounds for donations. Google it or check out Youtube if you think I’m making this up. Keywords are “I can’t believe I’m searching Santa robberies on the Internet.”

This means, the Santa Cop idea is not a PNP original. In fact, the confidential study mentioned above carries the subhead: “What’s Effective in Robberies Can Be Effective in Police Work Too.” All points considered, the Santa Cop theory is sound enough to be put into practice.

The first to comply with the order was the Regional Police Office 7 about two weeks ago. In a ceremony similar to a sending off of peacekeeping forces to Indonesia, policemen in the region lined up at the PRO 7 grounds to receive their supply of Santa hats and Stork menthol candies.

They were also given ATM-size cards with the Miranda Doctrine printed on them, but with a slight modification to fit the Santa Cop mission: “You have the right to remain silent – HO HO HO – Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law – HO HO HO … “

When you see these policemen in your neighborhood, don’t act surprised. Just laugh.

(sun.star cebu, december 18, 2007, opinion page)