Jose Ma Montelibano - Police Clearance For Candidates

It has become usual practice in the hiring business to ask job seekers to get police clearances. I am not exactly sure how this practice came to be, but I must assume that it took off from an older practice of requiring NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) clearances for certain purposes. I remember in the 1970's, during martial law, that I was required to get an NBI clearance when I applied for a passport. I was told then that this requirement tried to prevent the flight from the law by citizens who are being tried for serious crimes, by wanted criminals, and by those already convicted but somehow are on the loose.

Later, much later, I noticed that employers would demand of job applicants, even of those applying to be family drivers and domestics helpers, to secure a police clearance. While the police clearance may alert employers about a few serious cases having affected the lives of a few applicants, I realized from friends and employment agencies that the police clearance was a requirement which would put at relative ease the minds of employers that the applicants have no record of stealing. More than any wrongdoing, it is stealing, or the tendency to steal, which interests employers the most. Any record that the applicant may have related to stealing or even suspected of having done so automatically eliminates that applicant from possible employment.

What is noteworthy is not that job applicants are asked to get police clearances, but that this requirement is especially required of ordinary Filipino citizens and often not required of those who are rich or famous. Our society is still anchored on double standards, on a local caste system which first divides our people by their economic levels and then moves on to divide them in other ways. What starts as general categorizations of rich and poor morph to other and more subtle differentiations, not much different from the days of segregation between blacks and whites in the United States. The requirement of police clearances for ordinary or for poor Filipino citizens, which is usually waived of those coming from economic classes A & B (and the executives who have come from Class C), is a manifestation of how economic class categorizations can create double standards even in the manner morality and character are prejudged.

In other words, we insult ordinary or poor Filipinos by trying to see if they have been involved in any form of dishonesty by requiring them to get a police clearance when they apply for a job but not requiring the same for those who are rich, famous or powerful. Yet, whatever ordinary or poor Filipinos may be able to steal will be small, will be proportional to what their lowly positions allow them to have access to. Even as we insult the ordinary and the poor, we defer to the higher classes of citizens, the rich, famous or powerful by according them ease when they apply for a job. It is as though the ordinary and the poor are more susceptible to stealing than the elite of the land.

In crux, this assumption of honesty among the upper classes and suspicion of dishonesty among the vast majority of Filipinos has been the bane of Philippine society. We fear more that residents of Tondo or Payatas cannot be trusted while residents of plush villages like Forbes Park and Ayala Alabang are not only more trustworthy but admired and more accepted as role models. Truly, it is as though Filipinos are still live in pre-Hispanic datu systems and the subsequent colonial times. An ordinary or poor Filipino will be required to get a police clearance but a president of the republic accused and convicted of plunder will be exempted of the same requirement. This unfair and stupid double standard has given the rich, the famous and the powerful exemptions which they do not deserve as a class because the rape and plunder of our national patrimony and public funds have been done only by them as masterminds and beneficiaries.

When international agencies with the expertise to measure the levels of corruption of governments around the world consistently tell us that our political leaders steal as much as a third to half of our national budgets, the level of corruption in our country is equivalent to hundreds of billions every year. It is not the ordinary and the poor who steal these hundreds of billions, it is not the ordinary or the poor who are the thieves or kawatans we must be afraid of, it is those whom we place in high office through our votes - and those who are appointed by them. It is Congress who pass our tax laws, it is Congress who set the budgets for governance and government programs, and it is Congress who has first access to deciding who and where government contracts should go to. In those contracts are the many devious and dirty ways that the people's money are diverted from project to pocket.

We as Filipinos believe and know that our government is corrupt. Our government is not run by ordinary and poor citizens but by those who are rich, powerful and famous. The majority of workers in government may be ordinary Juan de la Cruzes, but it is not them who have the key to the billions, only to the hundreds or thousands that lowly government employees may have access to. It is Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada who have made it to the list of the world's most corrupt, not an ordinary or poor Filipino. The pork barrel belongs to Congress, not to Smokey Mountain or Payatas. The authority to award contracts and to spend the people's money comes from MalacaÃ±ang. And the one who convicts the crooks, or sets them free, is our Judiciary, not our barangay councils.

Only the highest and mightiest in our society, most especially in our government, can produce the greatest thieves because their status in life and in government allow them entry to everything we own. The police are not after them; in fact, the police report to them. Today, most of them are running for office, asking Filipinos to give them access to the people's money. From presidential candidates all the way to candidates for town councils, they must get the equivalent of a police clearance. Before we even entertain evaluating their talents and competencies, we have to evaluate their honesty. We cannot let thieves into our homes and we must let the dishonest into our government.

"There is always a philosophy for lack of courage." Albert Camus