016 ~ A World of Hearts

Swift and effectual action is the core of Filipino police endeavors. On the local front, it is the PNP Directorate for Operations that throbs as the nerve center for the beat worker’s activity. Its main concern is the fight versus criminality, insurgency, and terrorism.

Based on the well-entrenched, round-the-clock incident-monitoring and accomplishment-reporting system, it pumps policy on internal security, law enforcement, public safety, and special police operations. It is the umbrella of the Aviation Security Group, Civil Security Group, Maritime Group, Traffic Management Group, and the elite strike unit Special Action Force.

Currently, the directorial staff has dozens of commissioned and non-commissioned officers, several of whom are international-peacekeeping veterans of the missions in Cambodia, Kosovo, the Sudan, and Timor-Leste. These personnel conduct themselves with the bearing and disposition of a UN Blue Beret, enthusiastic to learn or relearn the ropes at national headquarters, of which procedures are noticeably different from those at mission-area offices.

The latest additions make up a brisk and blithe bunch, the willingness to be reimmersed in the local scene not fading from their faces. They join in the tedious policy-forming process with perseverance, especially that they come from a “paperless” culture, brevity being the soul of their global-policing transactions.

Without complaint, they pit themselves in the daily grind, morning till afternoon, of being deputies and aides and workhorses in an institution that is traditionally the hat where the buck stops, the repository of civil society’s flak. They brace up for street-level augmentation when the situation boards signal heightened- or full-alert status.

Humbly and unpretentiously, these police officers are ready to revise memorandum drafts that their superiors think could be better composed, to discuss standing regulations among their peers, and to seek help from juniors whenever needed. Thank Heavens, they do not project an image of having one over the “grounded-to-Motherland” others, and that they are nowhere abrasive and as irritating as pebbles in anyone’s shoe.

If asked, majority of them might not deny their aspiration to soon return to the more convenient multinational peace-support operational theatre. But thank Heavens still, none of them acts with hideous impatience and gross disregard for what they hold in their hands at the moment: matters of great national consequence.

Thank Heavens most of all, they don’t seem to be doing all the good that they are observed to be doing –for nothing but bland compliance and self-serving recognition.

It’s probably because they recognize and honor the duty that they owe their country, the duty to carry out duties at home, before aching to go back to some land yonder.

It’s probably because they recognize and honor the duty to demonstrate to their own people, in their own little directorial-staff-desk-action way, the same compassion they have shown to the citizens of another nation.

It’s probably because they are no ingrates and they embrace the fact that they are morally bound to love their country first and foremost.

It’s any one of these, or all of the above.