THE VALID POLICE DISPERSAL OF THE VIOLENT RALLY AT THE U.S. EMBASSY

Rally organizers knew that a peaceful program or rally will have no media impact so they’d probably planned the vandalism and deliberate agitations even before the protest action started. What they didn’t planned on was that their errant agitations would cause a hothead to run over their ranks with a police van.

If they were peaceful as they claimed, we would have seen a rally just like the one held by Marcos loyalists at the Supreme Court just a few days prior. But instead we saw agitated protesters charging the police line, we saw vandals spray-painting and
pounding the embassy façade and we saw a mob throwing rocks and other projectiles at the police lines.

Manila Police forces acted within bounds in its dispersal action against the unruly and increasingly violent rallyists (see photo above of rallyist attacking a negotiating police officer) at the U.S. Embassy in Manila on Oct. 19, 2016. The ONLY police officer who overreacted was PO3 Kho who drove the police van and run over several protesters. That’s the scene most media are showing and that’s what make people mad – the deplorable action of ONE PERSON.

PO3 Kho’s motives should be looked into and if proven that he’d overreacted because he blew his temper, he should be dismissed. He may be a bad egg and a black eye for the PNP waiting to happen. In such case, he has no place in the new PNP that Pres. Duterte envisions.