Interior and Local Government (DILG) Officer in Charge (OIC) Eduardo Ano give his first directive to incoming Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Oscar Albayalde.

In a press release issued on Friday, the DILG said Ano ordered the current National Capitol Region police director to “scale up” the PNP's internal cleansing program.

Albayalde who will replace PNP Director General Ronald Dela Rosa is set to be the new head of the Philippine National Police on April 18.

“The DILG chief said his first directive to Albayalde upon assumption to office is to scale up and implement nationally the internal cleansing he successfully implemented in NCRPO especially against AWOL, sleeping, non-performing, and drinking-on-the-job cops,” it stated.

In an interview, Albayalde said he will focus on internal cleansing and disciplining their forces.

“Yes, we will focus on disciplining our force. Discipline is very important, even before when I was a senior officer (that is) my advocacy and I think there a lot of ways to discipline the police forces and includes training,” he said.

“I talked with Secretary Ano and he is very supportive on this program to enhance the training of policemen. This is part of our internal discipline and of course our internal cleansing. We will go on extensively on our internal discipline at internal cleansing program,” he added.

Albayalde said he wants to have standardized training for policemen, like the one given to the Special Action Force (SAF) of the PNP.

“He (Ano) is very supportive to my suggestion to enhance our training school because it is one way of disciplining our policemen, over the years we can see this from the SAF where I came from during my junior year for five years, we can see there that the training really mold a policeman until he retires to PNP,” he said.

“I suggested as Regional Director of NCRPO that we at least standardize our training because in Philippine Public Safety College (is) not under us but once they were given to us after their graduation on basic training course, we can still retrain,” he added. Robina Asido/DMS