Repeal PD 1602, Rethink Policing

The Philippine National Police has been in the news lately, and not for the right reasons. The headlines have not been about drug lords captured or syndicates dismantled, but about the arrest of old men and women caught playing tong-its, cara y cruz, pusoy, mahjong, or bingo. Small-time offenders, often first-timers, jailed as if they were hardened criminals.

The image is absurd: senior citizens in handcuffs, crammed into cells, their crime nothing more than trying to pass the time. It is made more grotesque when these arrests ripple into tragedy. A man is jailed for petty gambling, his son goes out to look for him during a flood, contracts leptospirosis, and dies. The father suffers jail for cara y cruz; the son suffers death for no crime at all.

This is where PD 1602 has brought us. It masquerades as a law against illegal gambling, but in truth it punishes poverty. It has turned the weakest members of our society into easy targets, while giving the police a convenient excuse to chase numbers. Arrest quotas have become the measure of success. Justice reduced to arithmetic.

But what happens next? After the police make their arrest, prosecutors file charges, often on flimsy evidence, because their own measure of accomplishment is simply the number of cases filed. Judges then inherit these dockets, clogged and bursting. The accused languish in jail while the trial drags on for years. Justice, already delayed, becomes punishment itself.

This is the cycle we live with: aggressive policing, aggressive prosecution, prolonged trial detention. A system that confuses action for accomplishment, numbers for justice.

The results are predictable. Our jails are the most crowded in the world, bursting at three times their capacity. Two out of every three behind bars are not convicts but detainees, unconvicted, presumed innocent. The average pretrial detention stretches to months, sometimes years. Many plead guilty to crimes they did not commit, just to go home. Our justice system, instead of correcting wrongs, compounds them.

The evidence is clear: this is not justice, it is futility.

What then must be done? We must rethink the role of the police. Arrest should not be their only tool, detention not their only measure of success. For first-time, non-serious, non-violent, victimless crimes, the police should have alternatives: warnings, citations, reprimands. These are not signs of weakness; they are acts of discernment. They show that the police can tell the difference between a hardened criminal and a poor man trying to pass the time.

For this to work, the police need proper databases. A first-timer may be warned, but repeat offenders must be flagged. For the serious, violent, and repeat offenders—the ones who pose genuine threats—the police can justify detention. But even then, alternatives exist: supervised release, barangay monitoring, community-based oversight. Jail should be a last resort, not a default.

This requires professional discretion, something the system has beaten out of the police by chaining them to quotas. It requires training and education that teaches officers to see themselves not as jailers, but as problem solvers. Yet our criminology schools continue to glorify aggression, teaching cadets to treat every offender as dangerous, every violation as an excuse for detention. We must overhaul that education, emphasizing community policing, problem-oriented policing, and the careful exercise of discretion.

And above all, we must change what we count. Not just arrests. Not just cases filed. Police should be rewarded for citations given, warnings issued, community dialogues held, barangay consultations attended. Prosecutors should be rewarded not for the number of charges they file, but for the quality of cases they build. Judges should be freed from bloated dockets, so they can dispense justice swiftly and surely.

This ties directly to the reforms we have long been calling for: bail reform, custodial hearings, faster trial dispositions. Bail must not be a weapon to keep the poor in jail, but a mechanism to ensure fairness. Custodial hearings must ensure that judges, not police, decide whether detention is necessary. Trials must move with urgency, not drag for years.

PD 1602 is the clearest symbol of a failed philosophy. It has turned policing into an accounting game, prosecution into mechanical filing, and justice into punishment of the powerless. It must be repealed. But repeal alone is not enough. We must replace the system of quotas and arrests with a system of alternatives, discretion, and community-based justice.

There are, indeed, many alternatives to arrest and detention. The police do not have to keep implementing the same failed strategies. They do not have to be complicit in a cycle that fills our jails and empties our communities of hope. They can choose differently. They must.