Shuffle or Purge?

When Police Regional Office (PRO)-6 tells the public a mass relief of police chiefs is just “normal rotation” and then adds that the relieved commanders need a refresher because “maybe they’ve forgotten,” it stops sounding routine and starts sounding like a systems problem.

Rotation is not the issue, because staying in one post for five to 10 years is not healthy for any command culture, and fresh eyes can break lazy habits and cozy arrangements.

The issue is why the organization is discovering leadership gaps only after a dramatic reshuffle, instead of catching them through the boring, regular work of evaluation, coaching, and continuing education.

That “refresher course” line practically admits that core skills in criminal investigation procedures and unit management have drifted, which should worry everyone who has filed a blotter report and then waited weeks for updates that never come.

To be fair, PRO-6 can point to improving numbers, including a reported drop in total crime incidents in 2025 and a Crime Solution Efficiency of 90.01 percent with Crime Clearance Efficiency at 96.65 percent, figures it cited in a regional summary released in January 2026.

But good topline stats do not erase the fact that policing is also about case quality, victim care, evidence handling, and discipline, and those are exactly the things that collapse when leadership is rusty or distracted.

If retraining is necessary now, the public deserves to know what the baseline is, because training without clear standards becomes a box-ticking exercise and a convenient way to say “we did something” without proving anything changed.

It also does not help that the debate over who gets key posts is being framed as a matter of local chief executive preference, when the law intended to keep the police service from becoming an extension of local politics.

Section 51 of Republic Act 6975 deputizes governors and mayors as representatives of the National Police Commission and gives mayors the authority to choose a chief of police from a list of five eligibles.

But the Supreme Court, in Andaya vs. RTC Cebu City, was blunt about the point of this structure, saying it is meant “to enhance police professionalism and to isolate the police service from political domination,” and it stressed that the mayor’s authority is limited to selecting from the list, not controlling the list or the appointment process.

If PRO-6 is leaning heavily on “prior consultation” with local executives to justify certain placements, then it should be equally loud in showing how it safeguards independence when the next investigation touches City Hall.

There is also a governance lesson in the fine print of police professionalization, because Republic Act 8551 set maximum tenures for key positions precisely to prevent stagnation, and it even tasks the commission with a qualifications upgrading program so skills do not rot quietly on the job.

So here is the practical way forward: publish the retraining curriculum and the pass-fail standards, require periodic recertification for station commanders, and run a six-month post-training audit that checks case backlogs, evidence management, complaint handling, and conviction support, not just crime counts.

Then insulate rotations from local pressure by making the shortlist criteria and scoring public to oversight bodies, documenting recusals when conflicts arise, and treating “mayor’s input” as one factor, not the deciding factor.

Finally, make transitions safer for communities by requiring turnover audits before a chief leaves, including a written status of major cases and pending warrants, so rotation improves policing instead of resetting it.