The Irawan shooting incident on Good Friday that ended in the death of two cops and a corrections officer tells us something deep about the culture of Philippine law enforcement than what an official investigation and report will care to admit.
A band of police officers, by some accounts apparently under the influence of alcohol, responded to a shooting incident involving a fellow cop without authorization from their commanding officer. They went there on their own initiative, for their own reasons, and by their own code.
That code has a name. In the barracks, in the precincts and the patrol cars, they call it “tropa”. Tropa in military etymology simply means your people, your circle. The ones you eat with, drink with, cover for, and, when the situation demands it, avenge. In the civilian world it equates with the barkada, where one that watches each other’s backs, or when your officemates close ranks around a colleague in trouble. But in the world of men in uniform, where the stakes involve firearms and legal authority and life and death, it is something else entirely.
It is, at its most dangerous, a parallel command structure. It operates not by rank or regulation but by debt, loyalty, and the unspoken language of brotherhood that is ingrained in the Filipino psyche. The tropa psychology does not originate in the military or police academy. It originates in Filipino culture itself. It arrives in police or military uniform already fully formed.
A cadet who grew up learning the weight of utang na loob already understands the emotional architecture of tropa before he ever receives his police badge on graduation day. The adolescent who learns pakikisama, the ethic of getting along, of not breaking ranks with the group, of subordinating individual judgment to collective harmony, is already being trained in the logic that will later excuse silence even in the face of a colleague’s abuse.
These are not pathologies imported from outside Filipino society but are values that become instruments of harm when transplanted into an institution with weapons and impunity. Utang na loob, in a precinct, means you do not testify against the officer who once saved your life. Pakikisama, in a patrol team, means you do not question why your partner fired. Tropa, in a brotherhood of armed men, means that the rules of the institution are secondary to the rules of the circle.
Sociologists who study armed organizations have a more clinical name for this. They call it “in-group loyalty bias”. It is the tendency of tightly bonded groups to extend moral consideration preferentially to members of their own circle while discounting the claims of outsiders. In police organizations specifically, this has been studied extensively in the context of what researchers call the “blue wall of silence”, the informal but powerfully enforced norm against reporting or testifying against fellow officers.
The phenomenon is not uniquely Filipino. What is uniquely Filipino is the degree to which the cultural scaffolding already in place makes the blue wall not an aberration but a natural extension of how we tend to relate to each other. We saw this in Oplan Tokhang, the centerpiece of the Duterte administration’s drug war. That program may have had the formality of a law enforcement policy but even beyond it, it functioned as a permission structure. It told police officers that the institutional hierarchy would cover for what the tropa decided to do in the dark. The result was a high body count, and Duterte under trial in the ICC.
It was the systematic corruption of the chain of command itself, as officers who participated in extrajudicial killings were protected, promoted, and in some cases decorated, because the tropa held.
Most manifestations of tropa culture are quieter. And they are more insidious for being quiet. It is the traffic officer who gives someone a pass because the violator happened to be a fellow cop or a neighbor. It is the investigator who builds a case so slowly it effectively disappears. It is the precinct commander who does not ask too many questions about where his men were on a particular night.
It is, perhaps, the special investigation task group that arrests a suspect in the celebrated Joanna Infante murder case, calls it a key development, and then goes silent for months. We do not know for certain that this is what is happening in the high-profile cases currently being handled by the City PNP. But what we can see is a pattern of silence consistent with how institutions behave when the tropa norm has been activated. You do not cover up what does not threaten the circle. You do not stonewall what does not implicate the brotherhood. The silence itself is a kind of evidence. Not of guilt, but of the priority order that governs decision-making inside the institution.
Make no mistake. There is something genuinely admirable about the solidarity of men who face danger together. The officer who runs toward a gunfight because he will not leave his partner behind is exhibiting something that looks, from the outside, very much like the same instinct that later keeps him silent about that partner’s misconduct. These are not different psychologies. They are the same psychology operating in different contexts.
The problem is not the instinct but the de facto absence of an institutional counter-force strong enough to govern it. De facto, because there are, in fact, written operational protocols and manuals that are intended to prevent abuse. Every police organization still grapples with this. The difference between a police force that manages tropa culture and one that is managed by it lies almost entirely in institutional design. They depend on whether the systems of accountability, investigation, and discipline are genuinely independent of the social networks that produce the brotherhood in the first place.
This is the harder truth that the Irawan incident forces the PNP to confront. It is easier to be angry at the four officer who responded to a fellow cop without authorization. But the more honest question is why any of us are surprised. Those men were not trained by the PNP alone. They were trained by everything Filipino culture taught them about what loyalty means and who it is owed to.
