The order was issued following a case in which a young man was arrested with a false gang member profile.
Arbitrary detentions under the emergency regime do not stop. A few days ago, in the Santa Ana Precinct, a person with no ties to gangs was captured, apparently, with a profile prepared at the same time of arrest.
The case resulted in the head of said delegation, Commissioner Bartolo Evaristo Padilla, ordering the head of the Investigations Department to “guide and supervise” all the investigators of that office, to refrain from preparing profiles or files with false data with those in which a person is accused of belonging to a gang group.
The written order was issued on April 2, under the memorandum PNC.SA100.1/00111/JDSA/2024 in which it literally states that, in order to comply with recommendations made by the Control Unit, in relation to a complaint by Mrs. Berta G., regarding the detention of the son, Ricardo Ernesto G., the staff be guided and supervised so that they can prepare criminal profiles based on information confirmed through investigations or with existing information in the files or control systems that the institution has, with due diligence to not harm third parties or fall into acts that constitute misdemeanors or crimes.
“Guide and supervise the personnel under their command, in the sense that criminal profiles must be prepared with information previously confirmed through an investigation and/or existing in the corresponding files or control systems, for which they must be as diligently possible to avoid making mistakes, in order not to harm third parties and avoid incurring actions constituting disciplinary or criminal offenses,” the police document reads.
According to various police sources, many people have been detained by police or military personnel and placed under the command of the Attorney General’s Office on charges of collaborating with or belonging to gangs, with the only evidence being a fraudulently prepared gang member record.
According to informants, agents usually immediately prepare files with data obtained from the identity documents of the people they have detained. Another way is that during patrols they search people, take the DUI data, when they return to the post or delegation they prepare the file and then return to make the arrests.