The PRESIDENT SPEAKS
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The PRESIDENT SPEAKS
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| Keynote speech, Dumaguete Police Anniversary, January 30, 2008
Perhaps this would be a good occasion to reflect on what would be an ideal police force, and to think again on the extent that our police force, as it is constituted today, would meet this ideal. Allow me to share with you my modest thoughts on this matter. First, I believe that an ideal police force is a people’s force. It is not a force that exists outside the community it serves. It derives power from the community and it exists for the community. It wields not the power of the gun but the power of goodwill and trust of the people that it protects. A police force existing outside of the community it serves, serving its own purposes rather than the welfare of the people it protects, is nothing but an instrument of tyranny. While it might have the power to coerce, an ideal police force wields the power of trust and confidence of the weak and the powerless. The ideal persons in police uniform exude confidence in the law rather than dread of persons of the law. The person in uniform gives to the general public a sense of being safe rather than fear of becoming a victim of coercion and brutality that too often accompany those who think that the uniform gives them special powers over the citizenry. The ideal police force does not enforce the peace; rather, it inspires the community to create peace. The ideal police force serves people and makes people thank God that they have their police with them. Second, I believe that the ideal police force is a creative and effective marriage of professional competence and of technical prowess to do police work on the part of our police personnel, and cooperation and confidence on the police on the part of our community. The best technically competent police force falls short of ideal if it is not combined and supported by a cooperative and trusting community. And a community that cannot cooperate with and trust its police force would not deserve an iota of the investments that our police personnel may undertake on preparing themselves for the service. The ideal police force demonstrates an audacity to serve because of its confidence in the trust of the people it serves. And the people that it serves have the audacity to trust its police force because it has confidence that its police force is competent and has the unsullied integrity to serve. And thirdly, the ideal police force derives resources from the community it serves. It does not impose on its community because the community sees it as its own. The community owns its police and so the police can expect that everyone in the community, and all of what the community has, would be ultimately among its force multipliers. The ideal police force gets support from the community – social, political and material. And it does so because the community sees in its police force an asset that allows it to develop and acquire even more resources for itself. It gives to its police because it knows that its police allow it to prosper. In
short, the ideal police force can exist only in an ideal community. And
so, we cannot expect our police force to even begin moving toward the
ideal unless – and not until – the community itself commits
to move toward becoming an ideal in supporting its police.
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