A Vancouver police officer I know had a dream come true when he recently made it to the elite SWAT team after days of extensive and selective “tryouts”. Only a handful from hundreds of veteran and experienced officers applying for the pro­gram made it.

What happens next is that they will spend the rest of their lives doing nothing else but rigorous and intensive training, then staying on stand-by and on-call for when one of those dreaded days like when a crisis needs them, for example a terrorism attack or hostage-taking situ­ation.On that sad and disgraceful August day in Manila, eight tourists who were held hostage died. Collective international re­action was sadness and anger over how the Filipino police handled the situation. In HongKong specifically, there’s been a lot of reported retributions to the poor Fili­pino contract workers there. One instance was a Filipino domestic helper who, com­ing home to her employer, found her bed littered with rips of black paper and her belongings thrown out, and eventually getting fired by the employer.

People get to understand when a de­ranged gunman kills hostages but they cannot grasp when the hostages are killed by their supposed rescuers. Critics cite the inefficiency and incompetence of the Filipino police. Some reports say that one hostage - the teenager of that family from Canada - died when his head got smashed by the heavy iron mallet used by one of the policemen who smashed through the window glass where the poor teen was sit­ting.

One gunman, many many cops, eleven hours, eight hostages dead. What did re­ally go wrong? In one of the videos of the resulting panel investigations a high-rank­ing police officer (who can’t even speak English for heaven’s sake) was diagram­ming on the board the protocols and procedures that the police use in such situations. Yeah, right, impressive draw­ings. Procedures are only as effective as the kind of people who follow them - and communications. Perhaps there were one too many chiefs that day that nobody knew who’s really in charge and nobody remembered the correct procedure? Or perhaps the communication equipment they were using is configured for english and cannot handle the local dialect (hah hah).

About competence and efficiency, a question is how do one become a po­liceman in the Philippines, more so, how do one become a riot policeman or get into the elite SWAT team? I doubt if it has changed but what I remember in my time was if you failed to get a college degree and cannot find a decent job but you are able-bodied and has a “godfather” in city hall then you can probably make it to the police force, no sweat. What training do you get? I’m not really sure. How do I know this? Because I come from a place where almost everybody were in the police force (or at least in their payroll).

The other question is why do they want to become policemen in the first place? The nice and correct answer, of course, is the desire and conviction to uphold the law and protect the citizens - and tour­ists as well. Now that I’m not sure. What I know is that policemen or “pulis”, par­ticularly the male genre, has so much perks - they can get to ride the bus and jeepneys free, eat in restaurants free (or collect breakfast money from those poor jeepney drivers who ply their routes earlier than the car barn times), collect “tongs” (street tax imposed by street cops on ev­ery street corner where jeepneys ply) and, most common of all, get to have a few “kabits” (mistresses) that they maintain or house separately.

There’s just so much to consider in se­lecting people for a lawman’s job - basic education (better still to have some edu­cation in law), the right character, the right set of skills, proper training and simple common sense. What we have seen in that fateful day was a total lack of training, common sense and everything else. Well, knowing the pinoy character everybody wants to be the “hero”, so blame Holly­wood. Yeah - those stunts work well in the movies.

What happened in that August day - to borrow Roosevelt’s speech - “a date which will live in infamy”, was totally un­acceptable. Doesn’t matter which nation­ality is involved. Formal apology really means nothing, specially to the relatives of those who died can reverse the time and bring those people back to life. The only right thing that the Philippine government can do is reform the police force. Get rid of the incompetents and those beer-bellied sluggards with breaths smelling like barbecued liver, and, the most difficult one, make it punishable for any cop to have kabits. Oh, and yes, teach them how to speak English, so the next time they want to become heroes they would at least speak the part.

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