Jueteng Money And The Police

In today's Philippine Daily Inquirer, the front page story talks about jueteng, the popular local lottery that is often blamed as the single biggest source of corruption in the country. According to the article, jueteng is a 30 billion peso a year industry, with kickbacks of up to 5 million pesos a month going to high-level government officials, and smaller amounts trickling down to mayors and Barangay officials.

Jueteng in one form or another will always be around. For the poor who make up the bulk of the participants, it's not a sport played for pleasure, but rather a gamble on the possibility of making extra money needed for survival. It is one of those things that is so ingrained into the culture that it can never be stamped out entirely. But there are things we can do to control the harm it does.

According to Isabela Gov Grace Padaca, we cannot rely on the police to fight jueteng, because many police departments receive as much as 80% of their operating budgets from mayors, who in turn get that money from jueteng kickbacks. This, by the way, is only one of many problems which result from police dependence on local government officials. Entire police departments are beholden, not to the city government, but to the elected officials who supply the money.

But as always there is a simple solution. And that solution is through regulation. I am not so naive as to believe that a few rules will clean up the country, but rules do provide the foundation for taking action against violators. We wish we could rely on the honor system, but that's just not realistic. In this case, the rule we need is one that requires ALL police funding to come from the national level.

This doesn't mean that local governments can't financially support their own police forces, it just means they can't do it with direct cash payments. A city mayor can still buy a patrol car for one of his precincts, he just has to route the money through the national government first. And there is no reason that the turnaround should take more than a few days. The moment the national office receives confirmation of a deposit, they can issue a check or otherwise transfer the money to the designated local police department, along with specific instructions on how that money is to be used.

I'm not suggesting that we limit the financial support that a local government can provide to its police department. Just that we regulate that support to prevent illegal payments. The law, and the process itself, would have to be designed to ensure that legitimate support reaches the beneficiary just as quickly as it does now, and that funds cannot be diverted for any reason, but that's not really hard to do. I'm not talking about government giving more money to local police departments. This is a simple rerouting of legitimate government funds, disbursed by city governments to city police departments. Other than the administrative costs of managing this program, there is no additional expense to government. This is a simple check and balance measure which will allow greater control over jueteng money, kickbacks, and the general problem of improper relationships between local government and police officials.

Every mayor in the country already claims that all financial support they provide to their local police comes from legitimate government sources. If this is true, what would be the harm in adding a little check and balance to the process?