Picture Taking: Policemen After Hostage Crisis, Re-training To Follow

Philippine police have admitted they did not have the skills, equipment or training to handle Monday's bus siege, in which eight Hong Kong tourists were killed after being taken hostage. The force said talks with the gunman had been handled poorly, and relations with the media had broken down. Security experts, survivors and Chinese officials have all criticised the Philippine authorities.

They even had an article on their website that the Philippines didn’t need the deadliest attack on foreign tourists to expose the flaws in its security forces.

Buddhist monks led prayers for the victims in Manila on Tuesday, while angry demonstrators converged on the Philippine embassy in Hong Kong. The Philippines has promised a thorough investigation and is sending a delegation to Hong Kong to explain what happened. Of 25 people initially taken hostage, nine were freed after initial negotiations. The UK Foreign Office said two of them were British nationals. The Philippine driver then fled the bus, leaving 15 people on board with the gunman until the end of the siege. Unconfirmed reports say at least one of the dead was a dual Chinese-Canadian citizen.

Bloomberg correspondent in Bangkok, Daniel Ten Kate, in his article said that the tourist deaths underscore the risks of traveling and working in a country ranked 130th out of 149 in the Global Peace Index, which weighs factors such as violent crimes, access to weapons and political instability. Seven foreign chambers of commerce representing companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s largest oil company, and Citigroup Inc., the third- biggest U.S. bank, asked the government in May to rescind an order to publish the names of top taxpayers on safety concerns. Tourism to the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands with Asia’s highest unemployment rate, has lagged behind the rest of the region. The nation attracted 3 million tourists last year, about a tenth the number that visited Malaysia, according to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Changing the security environment will require an overhaul of the national police so officers have the right equipment and training, said Ian Bryson, a Singapore-based analyst for Southeast Asia and the Pacific at Control Risks. Herman Joseph Kraft, executive director of Manila's Institute for Strategic and Development Studies said that this is a systemic problem.  The Manila police department is supposed to be the largest in the Philippines, the best trained and best equipped. But we saw how far below standard they fall.

“Bigger long-term issues are the ready availability of firearms, the culture of violence of criminal gangs and how it is fostered by family dynasties in politics,” he said. “It’s all connected: the guns, the violence, the money, the crime. A penny novella played every day.”