When The Police Can’t Get Their Story Straight

There’s a version of this story where everything makes sense.

The Criminal Investigation and Detection Group (CIDG) ran two simultaneous anti-illegal firearms operations in Pavia on the evening of Feb. 23. They coordinated with the local police chief beforehand. Mark Alarcon got arrested for allegedly selling a .38-caliber revolver for PHP 3,500. Gene Stephanie Guillem was checked, cleared, and released. Case closed.

That version, unfortunately, does not match what actually happened on the ground.

What actually happened is that a security guard heard gunshots and watched men drag a cyclist into a red sedan.

A mother rushed to the Pavia police station terrified that her daughter had been abducted. Captain Ritz Field Presquito deployed the Scene of the Crime Operations team, launched a hot pursuit, and kept officers on the road until 8:30 the following morning — chasing what the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group now insists were pre-planned, sanctioned operations.

Three separate law enforcement entities then issued three separate statements that do not agree with each other on the basic facts of what happened.

What happened is a system that failed in plain view of the public.

The CIDG claims Lieutenant Colonel Erwin Cordano coordinated with Presquito before the operations. But Colonel Bayani Razalan, the Iloilo police chief, says he was unaware of any coordination at his level.

Presquito himself has said almost nothing — he needed clearance from a spokesperson just to speak on the record.

And the Police Regional Office 6 described the Guillem incident as a “personal misunderstanding or love quarrel” without any mention that their own sister agency had simultaneously been running an operation on the same woman. Either the Police Regional Office 6 did not know, which is alarming, or they knew and left it out, which is worse.

The CIDG’s credibility here is not spotless either. There is a documented one-hour gap between when local police logged the first incident at 6:25 p.m. and when the CIDG says its entrapment operation on Alarcon began at 7:30 p.m. The inventory location is in dispute. And the coordination claim — repeated insistently — still lacks any specifics: no name, no time, no method. “We coordinated” is not coordination. It is a sentence.

Pavia Mayor Luigi Gorriceta is right to be frustrated. He is also right to escalate to Brigadier General Josefino Ligan. But before anyone’s head rolls — and Presquito’s appears to be first in line — it is worth asking the harder question: was the local police chief actually in the loop, or was he set up to fail by agencies that did not bother to tell him what was happening in his own jurisdiction?

The National Police Commission 6 ordering Presquito to appear for questioning is a reasonable step. What would make it meaningful is if the same rigor is applied to whoever signed off on operations without ensuring ground-level coordination was actually confirmed — not just claimed.

The Philippine National Police’s own guidelines on inter-agency operations exist precisely to prevent this kind of public confusion. When those protocols are skipped or handled sloppily, the cost lands on the community: a mother’s panic, an overnight manhunt, wasted Scene of the Crime Operations resources, and a public that had every reason to believe two abductions had just happened in their town.

The Police Regional Office 6 had the nerve to urge the public not to spread unverified information. That is fair advice, generally. But it lands a little hollow when the agency giving it cannot reconcile its own public statement with what the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group said the same afternoon.

Someone in this chain knew exactly what was going on that evening in Pavia. The public deserves to know who — and why everyone else was kept in the dark.