When it comes to peace and order in the Philippines, the first responders and

enforcers of mandates and laws would be the national police. In the country, the agency
in charge of the police force would be the National Police Commission. This agency
manages the administrative and enforcement matters of the Philippine National Police
as per the mandate of the 1987 Constitution and Major Police Reform Laws (Republic
Act No. 6975 and 8551). In addition to this, this agency is the upper structure of the
Philippine National Police in order to communicate to the secretary of the Department
of the Interior and Local Government. Whether it be a hostage situation, a robbery, or a
car crash, the Philippine National Police (PNP) is commissioned to ensure peace and
stability in these situations and ensure that crimes all throughout the country are at a
minimum.
The PNP then has institutional power over the people as they perform their
functions of enforcing the law, preventing and controlling crimes, maintaining peace and
order, and ensuring public safety and internal security with the active support of the
community. However, despite their philosophy being centered on serving and protecting
with honor to provide justice to the people, this power of the agency has been proven to
be abused by some officials. These corruptive tendencies in the agency are said to be
brought about by a combination of malfeasance and misfeasance that persists in an
institutional culture of poor management.1 This abuse of power can be seen in
occurrences of extrajudicial killings, bribery, and police brutality that have occurred in
both the current and previous administration. The country continues to face these
abuses of power and the people remain mistrustful of the country’s police arm where
they either find these uniformed men as prideful, dangerous, or easy to pay.

Causes
Multiple instances of abuse of power enacted by the police in recent society led
the group to focus on this problem. Since the police are viewed as the primary
representatives of security and defense, they are expected to have the power to do
everything it takes to maintain order even if their methods do not abide by the law. For
instance, the use of “illegal violence” by the police is permitted when attempting to
locate and arrest vicious criminals. This creates the tendency for illegal activities used to
carry out a policeman’s tasks to become a norm within the police force, such that new
recruits accept this as part of their “informal code” as a law implementer.2 Policemen
then use these presumed informal roles as an excuse to justify illegal practices. In line
with this, since policemen are the “esteemed” controllers of public order, they have the
perspective that their actions are beyond accountability. This is further encouraged by
two factors: 1) the inadequate implementation of laws that hold police officers
accountable, and 2) the enabling of the administration. The fact that the culture of

1
John Pike, "Philippine National Police (PNP) Corruption," Global Security,
https://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/world/philippines/pnp-corruption.htm.
2
Ellwyn, Stoddard. “The Informal ‘Code’ of Police Deviancy: A Group Approach to ‘Blue-Coat Crime’ on
JSTOR.” Jstor.org, June 1968.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1141940?origin=crossref#metadata_info_tab_contents.
bribery within the force is so widespread attests to the first factor. Bribery is perhaps
the most prevalent instance of how the police abuse their power. This follows the
principle of “quid pro quo” or something for something in which policemen receive
compensation in the form of gifts and money in return for favors such as avoiding
prosecution, manipulating evidence, ticket fixing, selling information, and more.3
Despite there being laws that prosecute corrupt policemen, the culture of bribery still
ensues within the force. As for the second factor, the drug war exemplifies how the
enabling of the abuse of police power by the administration can lead to drastic
consequences. Former President Duterte provided policemen with the “license to kill” in
cases involving drugs, even noting that policemen who kill suspected drug dealers will
not be put behind bars.4
While the abuse of power evinced by the police cannot be attested as an
established norm, there are multiple indicators of the phenomenon being in the first
stage of the norm life cycle. Finnemore and Sikkink identify norm entrepreneurs and
organizational platforms to be key elements in the success of still materializing norms
— both present in the police abuse of power. The police, the administration, and the
elite motivated by prestige, power, and money act as entrepreneurs for this norm. They
make use of dominant mechanisms such as persuasion, intimidation, and punishment to
reframe the institutional power entrusted to them to serve their own personal benefit.
This normative contestation engaged in by the aforementioned activists is manifested in
its “inappropriateness” to existing standards (i.e. integrity to the law), where they aim to
inject the acceptability of an abusive system to the public. With the continuously
evolving political landscape in the Philippines, we now define its tipping point and its
transition to norm cascade – this will occur when the state begins institutionalizing this
abuse. Looking at the passing of recent laws such as that of the Anti-Terror Bill5 that
gives the police access to arbitrary arrests and eliminates the need for due process,
there is a question of whether or not the phenomenon of police abuse of power can
already be classified under cascade given the power entrusted by the state to the police.
This lack of certitude has then led the group to conclude that the emerging norm has yet
to reach its tipping point.
Digging deeper into the matter at hand, the group identified that the oligarchic
democracy within the Philippines is one of the root causes of the worsening issue of the
abuse of power by the police. Elite democracy has been widely perceived as the
dominant framework of Philippine politics since the end of Marcos’s dictatorship. In this
framework, the Philippines is said to be dominated by the elite few who use their wealth
and power to control the country’s resources. This then leads to pervasive corruption
and violence being embedded in the political system. In an elite democracy, oligarchs
expand their wealth and influence by consolidating their power in the machinery used

3
HG.org, “Bribery - When Is It a Criminal Act?” Hg.org, 2022, .
4
Jim Gomez, “Duterte Orders Customs Chief to Shoot, Kill Drug Smugglers,” Washington Post.
5
Reuters, "Duterte's 'draconian' Anti-terror Bill Alarms Activists in Philippines,"
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-rights-idUSKBN2391QN.
by the state: its coercive (police power) and non-coercive structures (legal systems).6
This phenomenon is evident in the Philippines, as its laws, regulations, and policies are
all powerfully influenced by elite forces, such as politicians and corporations. Moreover,
this kind of democracy exempts the oligarchs themselves from being lawfully
condemned, putting them in a position in which they are said to be above the law. Thus,
police forces are given the power to do as they please as long as it serves the interests of
the elite.

Effects
One of the most prevalent effects of police power abuse is the growing mistrust
of the citizens towards them. As mentioned, the purpose of the police is to serve and
protect citizens and maintain peace. However, in the case that the police become the
cause of the loss of peace, who will be the one to protect the citizens from the harm that
they pose? How can the citizens trust the same people who caused them harm? More
often than not, instances such as this cause the masses to rally or even revolt against the
police as a means to make the police accountable for whatever injustices they are
responsible for. For instance, the social movement called ACAB which is short for “All
Cops Are Bastards” fosters hate and mistrust against the police for the many different
occasions in which they misused their power by taking innocent lives and wrongfully
imprisoning guilt-free civilians. This movement aims to generalize and critique the
entire police in an attempt to strip them of their credibility and ask the state to abate
their powers in such a way to prevent more cases of police abuse and brutality. In worse
cases, if the masses are not satisfied with the corrective measures of the police and their
way of “taking accountability for their mistakes”, some people would deliberately do
things that are against the law as a means of protesting against the law
enforcement—thereby, causing more chaos and collateral damage across different
communities.
On the same note, mistrust towards the police also perpetuates a culture of fear
and insecurity as people now become more scared of the police which then creates
public unrest due to the lack of sense of peace within their society. While the police have
presumed the role of protecting the citizens, when this role is not acknowledged by the
citizens whom they are expected to serve, the value of the role is lost and is therefore
reduced to a label. If this kind of notion persists, the citizens may no longer call cops
when they are in trouble, and vigilante justice may carry over and supersede existing
laws which are meant to protect lives and maintain fairness. As a result, some laws may
start to lose their legitimacy as citizens see no point in following, especially when law
enforcement agencies can get away with breaking the said rules they were supposed to
enforce.

Framework Evaluation

6
Salvador Santino Jr., “Constitutional Order in Oligarchic Democracies: Neoliberal Rights versus
Socio-Economic Rights - Salvador Santino F. Regilme, 2019,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2019, .
 Viewing the issue of the abuse of police power as a result of elite democracy
poses various gaps in analyzing the issue. First, the perspective of this framework is too
top down in a sense where only the elite is claimed to only have societal influence in the
country. The presence of the elite democracy is shown in the history of the Philippines
from the Spanish era until the present where most government positions are assumed
by the elite. However, this framework fails to take into account the power of the masses
and its citizens in holding the power of the elite in dictating the future of the country
based on their interest alone. In the past, the masses have also shown to be able to
influence the actions of the elite by acting as an opposition towards their power. In the
context of abuse of police power, protests are being organized to hold the authorities
accountable for their actions, limiting the power of the police by taking into
consideration the consequences of their actions to the public. The elite democracy
framework only focuses on how the oligarchs can continue to perpetuate this culture of
violence and fear through abusing the power of the police because of how exploitable
the state is at their hands. Hence, a possible framework that could challenge the notions
framed by elite democracy to the issue would be the contested democracy framework.
The contested democracy framework thus gives us more context on the power of
the masses, and the might of the “people at the bottom”, while also taking into account
the leftist groups that have the power to deepen our democracy, thus providing good
insight into how the problem of police abuse of power can be solved.
Police abuse of power is in direct contrast to the goals of the masses, as this
problem is a departure from an egalitarian or participatory political climate. A lot of the
roots of police abuse of power stem from the elite and their attempts at using violence
and coercion to maintain a formal democracy with “free and fair” elections that they can
manipulate and exploit. Abuse of police power, then, is just one of their (the elite)
avenues to achieve this fake version of a formal democracy. Roots such as the “culture of
bribery” and the “enabling of the administration” have elite influence written all over
them, and the rest of the roots (presumed informal roles of the police, police think they
are above the law, and lack of accountability and persecution) are just trickle down
effects of the previously mentioned elite influence.
A big part of the contested democracy framework deals with the power of the
poor and the marginalized, and how the masses work towards a more free and fair
democracy. It is then this pressure that will create a more democratic tomorrow. The
emergence of newer leftist groups can also be seen as a counter to continued police
abuse of power, as these groups actively try to defend themselves and those around
them from violence, harassment, and coercion.

Word Count: 1998

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‌
Appendix