The PNP and The Culture of Callousness

Retired national police comtroller Eliseo Dela Paz is offerting himself as the scapegoat for the outrageous EuroGenerals brouhaha.

Now there’s the latest admission that he and the the other star-rank officers who went to that Interpol meeting in St. Peterburg, Russia even had a sidetrip planned with their wives to see the sights in Warsaw and Vienna.

Dela Paz has even owned up to the fact that he was a willing errand boy for a PNP supplier “to buy luxury watches which were on sale in Vienna.”

Lamely, Dela Paz is even dishing out the lie that they were going to buy anti-crime gear.

BULL.

In making his ” blame it all on me” routine, Dela Paz is trying to contain the damage that has  tarred the record of recently installed police chief Jesus Versoza.

But really all that this EuroGeneral has achieved is to lay bare a culture of callousnessness that has embedded itself in an institution like the Philippine National Police.

Now we know that police generals have been routinely gong on training trips abroad with handsome allowances in their pockets (denominated in Euros even) to the tune of up to $467 in per diems (that’s PhP 22,416 per day).

Lamely we are being told that given the expensive hotel rates in such scenic destinations as Russia it cannot be helped that Juan dela Cruz must cough up taxpayers’ money to fund the police generals’ study trips, all the better to make them superb crime-busters.

It’s probably asking too much of our police brass accustomed to having errand boys at their beck and call and audit-proof intelligence kitties to spend on most anything under the Philippine sun. They must even feel entitled to such ‘perks’ given that elsewhere in our society a seeming culture of callousness has crept in.

Callousness to poverty, callousness to crime both petty and heinous, callousness to corruption, callousness to suffering of our fellowmen.

Now does anyone wonder why there are element in our society who are titred of shoiuting expletives and are thinking of other, including acts of extreme prejudice, to liberate themselves.

Even Vicky Belo cannot remove the callouses those in power have.

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