If you’ll recall what happened at Banga National High School in the Philippines, a 16-year-old with a Glock 9mm stormed the school with two full magazines. After it was over, two students and the shooter were dead. The shooter was reported to have ties to the so-called True Crime Community, that grim little corner of the internet where past shooters get worshipped and future ones get cultivated.
This week the National Bureau of Investigation announced it had picked up someone connected to the Banga shooting, along with a separate suspect in Cebu described as an online “groomer.” Not what most people think of as a groomer but someone who’d allegedly been coaching a student at another local school to copy the attack.
NBI Director Melvin Matibag said a “rescue” of ten kids from that groomer’s group could happen within days, using “rescue” instead of “arrest” because the people involved are minors. On paper, that’s a government finally treating radicalization like the crime it is, and I’ll admit it’s a step ahead of where the US usually finds itself on the issue of the TCC.
Here’s my problem, though. I don’t know enough about how Filipino law enforcement and the press actually interact to just take an announcement like this at face value, and a little digging didn’t exactly settle my nerves. Matibag has spent this year fielding accusations that the NBI gets used as a political weapon, denying claims of bias against government critics, and at one point publicly shooting down social media rumors that a fugitive senator had already been arrested, rumors he suggested were floated by people who “needed content.”
That’s a director who’s had to spend real time knocking down fake arrest claims in his own country, which tells me the information environment around Philippine law enforcement announcements is not exactly airtight. And the broader press landscape isn’t doing me any favors either.
The Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists despite an active media scene, and it currently ranks 114th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, sitting in the “difficult” category. That’s not a country where a reporter can simply walk into NBI headquarters, demand the paperwork, and expect an easy time of it.
So when Matibag stands in front of a Senate budget hearing and casually mentions, almost as an aside, that “yesterday we were able to get one of the individuals who is somehow related to what happened in South Cotabato,” without naming the person or describing their actual role, without a shred of detail, I’m not ready to just applaud and move on. Maybe they got the right person. Maybe the Cebu groomer really was coaching a copycat and really will lead to ten kids being pulled out of that group. Or maybe this is a government under pressure to show it’s doing something after three school shootings in four months.
I’d love to be wrong about this. I just don’t have the transparency to know either way, and until someone puts a name or a court filing to this arrest, I’m filing it under “claimed” rather than “confirmed.”
(Source)
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