THE POLICE Regional Office XI classified 11 barangays in Southern Mindanao as areas of concern for the Barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan Elections(BSKE) 2023.
Regional police director Brig Gen Alden Delvo said ten of the total number of barangays categorized as “yellow” are located in Davao del Sur.
These are the barangays of Kapatagan and Tres de Mayo in Digos; Litos, Tanwalang, and Talas in Sulop; Tamlangon and Poblacion in Matanao; Maibo in Magsaysay; Aplaya and Clib in Hagonoy.
The last barangay is Ompao in Tarragona in Davao Oriental.
“When a certain area is under category yellow, we have to deploy more forces but is not really that much because that is the lowest area of concern, the category yellow, so we’ll do monitoring [in the said areas],” Delvo told reporters in an interview.
The Commission on Election (Comelec) areas of concern classification has four categories: green, yellow, orange, and red.
Green refers to areas that do not have security concerns and are generally peaceful and orderly, while yellow is areas of concern, which means that these have a history of election-related incidents in the last elections, possible employment of partisan armed groups, the occurrence of politically motivated election-related incidents and had been previously declared under Comelec control.
Orange, meanwhile, means areas of immediate concern where there is a serious armed threat; while red means areas of grave concern, which exhibit combined factors under the yellow category with serious armed threats that may warrant the motu proprio (on its own) declaration of Comelec control.
Moreover, the regional police office will deploy more than 6,000 PNP personnel in the region for the local election.
The regional police office also augmented personnel in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).
“I would like to remind the policemen of Davao City Police Office and all of Police Regional Office 11 to be non-partisan in the exercise of the election process,” Delvo said.
“They already know that we already have guidance and, of course, in every election, we have to keep it safe,” he added.
