Every month or so, the editors of Philstar.com — the website that houses some stories from the Philippine Star newspaper and that I work for — receive written requests to have stories taken down.
The requests, most by email but some sent by mail, are from people who were reported to have been arrested years ago and whose arrests come up on online searches after the charges have been dropped, or the case dismissed or they are acquitted.
Most of the time, those who ask that stories about them be taken down are regular people.
In one case, it was the relative of someone who was reported to have been a drug suspect and whose name couldn't be cleared because the local police units all denied that the information came from them.
As long as they can show proof that the case has been dismissed, we usually accommodate the requests — most reports were from before our time anyway.
But that these things happen, is, I feel a case against writing police stories at all — or at least as a matter of course.
One of my failings is that I never covered the police beat and we don’t have one now, technically — our foundational beat is human rights — so I may have a bias against police stories.
But writing about someone’s arrest — often based on just a police or incident report, on sometimes in such a templated format — is, as The Objective points out, not a substitute for investigations.
Because they are based on police reports, they often end up parroting police talking points, sometimes at the expense of the presumption of innocence.
In the meantime, the allegations are treated as fact or at the very least given more weight.
They give the impression that police are taking action but leave readers with little more than confirmation that crimes do happen.
As we have seen in monitoring cases of attacks against journalists, arrests are the flashy and early part of what could be a long trial.
As a young reporter, I attended a forum where Marvic Leonen — dean of the UP College of Law then, senior associate justice of the Supreme Court now — challenged us to follow cases from arrest to verdict.
I feel that if we are not willing or able to do that, we have no actual business writing about how some random person was arrested as a suspect in a certain crime and then moving on to the next blotter report for our next story.
Are you a fan of crime stories? Suggest your favorites because I love reading and also being wrong.
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Anyway, a plan by the Makati Central Estate Association to remove protected bike lanes on Makati’s Ayala Avenue has been met with protest from commuters who see the move as part of a systemic regression from progress in active transportation that began during the pandemic lockdowns. As more people go back to work, the tendency has been to return to cars as the default mode of transport in Metro Manila.
A bizarre news story about how Manila Bay is biologically dead has been pulled from UCA News. The report, citing the non-existent Department of Fisheries, has been debunked by the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, which actually does exist.
The most bizarre part is the suspicion that it may have been written by AI, or also possibly by aliens with no familiarity with the Philippine bureaucracy.
Meanwhile, the sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression (SOGIE) Equality Bill met resistance at the House and Senate from the father-and-son team of Rep. (while also Bro.) Eddie Villanueva and his son, Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva.
I had been iffy about passage of the Religious Freedom bill at the House because — on one hand, people should be free to practice their religion, and, on the other — that exercise has often meant imposing Bible-based beliefs on secular matters.A UP professor was arrested last Tuesday by undercover cops over a case involving Social Security System remittances that she said had been settled long ago.
Apart from the unnecessary use of disguises, the arrest is feared to have repercussions on UP as a sanctuary from heavy-handed state tactics and on already battered civic spaces.Finally, from Bangkok, a feature on our counterparts in the National Union of Journalists Thailand, who are facing similar challenges in organizing media workers. Living under a junta aside, journalists there also working in the same situations that we are: Underpaid, overworked and with few protections or institutional support.
51. A case against police stories
I used to handle police beat, and it’s one of the most stressful things to write because of the requests (more like threats) to take a story down, which was not something I can do.
There also had been a handful of cases I followed from arrest to trial to judgment. And boy the satisfaction it brings—the bond between the person (arrested/accused) until eventual redemption.