IN our column last Friday we wrote about the activities of the Tagum City Police Office header by city director Jed Clamor.
The PNP Tagum City was kind of doing something which is not within its regular function which is maintaining peace and order in the community under its jurisdiction and ensuring that citizens abide by existing laws.
The Tagum PNP has launched a feeding program for children in Libuganon, one of the many barangays in that northern Davao city. The program is, we assume, the Tagum PNP’s way of bringing the police closer to the people it serves.
This program is to us, not surprising at all if undertaken by Tagum City PNP director Clamor. He could have learned that noble strategy of engaging the police with the people in its community from his former superior, then Davao City Police Office (DCPO) Director John Michael Dubria.
That was why, in that same column, we did not hesitate to mention that what Director Clamor did, and hopefully keeps on doing, has reminded us of P/Col. Dubria while still the head of the DCPO.
Dubria then did the unexpected from the police office. He initiated actual community relations work for the Davao City Police Office not just during Christmas but even on Valentine’s Day and other unusual times of the year while the DCPO was under his watch.
The last one that we could not forget was the DCPO Valentine’s Day visit and gift giving to the wards of a Home for the Elderlies in Buhangin. In that particular activity the men and women of Dubria ably substituted the close relatives of the senior citizens under the care of that facility who, perhaps for the longest time, have not visited their kin there, intentionally or not.
Meanwhile, during Dubria’s watch at the DCPO there was marked improvement in the city’s peace and order situation. We are familiar with that because as columnist of this paper we have regular updates on the city’s crime volume index as this is regularly monitored by our reporter assigned in the police beat.
But for that one unfortunate deadly incident at the Roxas Night Market one day in September 2016, the DCPO took a black eye. Yes, some politicians somehow, reasonably or not, heaped the blame of the security breach on the command. Perhaps these politicians and supposed police work “experts” forgot that the Roxas night market bombers were not just professional terrorists but also fanatics to their twisted cause.
So they did their thing not during the preceding month of August when the annual Kadayawan festival was celebrated with thousands of local and foreign visitors, but early the following month when nobody could have been expecting.
Thus, after the incident and the claims of certain political and civilian sectors that the failure in intelligence gathering by the police was primarily the reason the attackers were able to sneak to their target, all searing eyes seemed to be focused on the hapless DCPO chief. That is of course under the doctrine of command responsibility.
That unreasonable assertion though, as we had clearly observed then, was professionally “accepted” by the then DCPO chief, he being the man on top of the PNP organization in Davao City. And we can recall that it did not take long for Davaoenos to wait the announcement that a new city police director was assuming the post. The next time we heard of Dubria, he was already at Camp Crame supposedly to undergo additional schooling to prepare him for promotion.
Then latter, we got words that the former DCPO chief was heading the office of the PNP that is supervising and regulating businesses providing security services personnel to individuals, to corporations and others requiring such security. But that information we got was some time already.
So, in our column last Friday, still part of our treatise on the Tagum PNP’s novel and noble project, we could not help but ask the status and whereabouts of the former DCPO chief. We even went to the extent of saying that if Dubria was still posted in some insignificant unit of the PNP then he is one very useful asset wasted by inadvertence or possibly unfair treatment.
But last Saturday a person who introduced to us as one Marlu Villarosa and who we also assumed to have read that particular column of ours (though we hope that he is a regular follower of Rough Cuts), messaged us through the social media.
Marlu informed us that the former DCPO director has already been promoted to a Police Brigadier General and is now Regional Police Office 12 director. PRO 12 is based in General Santos City. According to Marlu, P/BGen. Dubria is a first cousin of his wife.
So we have no reason to doubt the veracity of his information
Our congratulations to the good general! Finally, General Dubria Sir, you are now back in harness. This time we are certain that you have all the opportunity to prove your detractors wrong. After all it is a dictum that a good man cannot be easily put down by anybody.
And as the Police Regional Director in that part of Mindanao you’ll surely have more time to replicate what you did during your watch at the Davao City Police Office. That is, bringing the PNP closer to the community it serves, making them feel that the policemen are their friends and protectors and not their enemies and predators.
Yes, your strategy of engaging the policemen with the community in activities other than the usual police responsibilities as defined in their job description is like “bringing Muhamad and the mountain to a meeting in a place of acceptable compromise.
That is, finding ways where mutual respect and cooperation can be worked out by both.
Again our hope for the best to our still personally unmet friend P/Brig. Gen. John Michael (or is it Michael John?) Dubria.
