FACT-CHECK: Torre did not say 911 responds in five minutes

MANILA – A quote card circulating on Facebook that credits Metropolitan Manila Development Authority General Manager Nicolas Torre III with saying the 911 emergency hotline responds within five minutes is fabricated.

CLAIM: Torre said in an interview that the 911 emergency hotline responds in five minutes.

RATING: FALSE

THE FACTS

The graphic was posted by the pseudo news page “Intel News PH” and mimics the on-screen layout of News5. It carries two quotes, one of them attributed to Torre and dated Aug. 16.

Torre denied the statement on his Facebook profile and challenged the page to produce proof that he said it on that date.

His most recent public remarks on emergency response came on Aug. 6, when he expressed confidence in the MMDA hotline 136. He did not mention 911 at that press conference.

The photograph used in the graphic comes from a Jan. 14 post on the MMDA official Facebook page and is unrelated to any recent statement on emergency response.

The fabricated quote attributed to Torre reads: “Mabilis po talaga rumesponde ang 911. Limang minuto lang dumating kami agad. Alam po yan ng taumbayan.”

CONTEXT

The post surfaced a day after the social media personality “Basty Askri” published a widely shared criticism of the 911 system on Aug. 15, describing an emergency in which help allegedly did not arrive.

Torre led a program promising five-minute police response during his 2025 stint as chief of the Philippine National Police, which is one reason the fabricated line reads as plausible.

WHY THIS MATTERS

The post kept spreading after Torre publicly denied it, drawing about 200,000 reactions, more than 9,400 comments, and more than 6,800 shares.

Emergency hotlines depend on public trust. Invented performance claims attributed to the official who runs the agency distort what residents expect when they dial for help, and they make honest reporting on response times harder to hear.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This fact-check was originally published by PressOne.PH, a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network Code of Principles, is republished by Daily Guardian under a content-sharing agreement. Daily Guardian edits were limited to house style. The verdict and the supporting evidence are unchanged.