ACTING Philippine National Police (PNP) chief LtGen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. on Monday said there is no such thing as “quota arrests,” referring to the controversial policy of his predecessor, Nicolas Torre III.

“There’s no such thing as quota arrests,” Nartatez told a media briefing at Camp Crame in Quezon City.

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He said intelligence and information, not numbers, are the sole basis of police operations.

Ideally, the PNP aims for a 100-percent arrest rate, said Nartatez.

Citing an example, he said the Directorate for Investigation and Detective Management (DIDM) has data on the number of wanted persons.

“What we are doing is we have these wanted persons, and we should arrest (them),” he said.

Nartatez’s statement was a response to a call by the detainee rights advocacy group, Kapatid, urging him to “rescind” Torre’s directive of using arrest numbers as a metric for police promotions.

Nartatez rules out 'quota' arrests

When Torre took over the PNP’s helm last June, he said the number of arrests a police officer makes would serve as a measure of the officer’s performance — a scheme reminiscent of the supposed quota system of drug-related deaths during the Duterte administration’s drug war.

The Commission on Human Rights warned that the directive could lead to abuses and rights violations by police officers.

Torre stressed that his order was for officers to meet their targets “within the ambit of the law.”