InsiderPH features the inspiring stories of Metrobank Foundation’s awardees as Outstanding Filipinos for 2025—teachers, soldiers and police officers who are making significant contributions to nation building.
The Philippines was lurching from one phase of pandemic restrictions to another; the streets were still, checkpoints glinted in the late afternoon heat, and the idea of gathering 1,300 police trainees in one place for their exams was not only impractical but dangerous.
In Clark Air Base, where he was serving as the Regional Training Manager of the Philippine National Police’s Special Training Unit 3, the dilemma was not just logistical but existential: if the state could not train its police force, what was left to deploy?
PCOL Obar was not the kind of officer to let a problem fester. As a young officer in the late 1990s, and later as a U.N. peacekeeper in East Timor in the early 2000s, he had learned that in moments of disruption, the institution that adapts survives.
“I have always believed that adversity is an opportunity to innovate,” he says. “If a situation seems impossible, that’s when you start looking for solutions others might not see.”
Adversity breeds innovation
It was in East Timor, in makeshift offices and under the discipline of international timelines, that he first saw the possibilities of online instruction: spare, functional, and portable.
Now, with pandemic-induced lockdown in Luzon and police trainees scattered in distant posts, he began to imagine a similar learning system for his special training unit.
In three months, working with IT trainees, police educators, and an urgency that felt both wartime and post-apocalyptic, he led a team that built the PNP’s Virtual Learning System (VLS), a platform accessible 24/7 even on a phone, with study modules, PowerPoint decks, and review materials.
Exams were automated, randomized, and proctored remotely, with systems to prevent cheating. The cost savings were enormous: no travel, no printed test papers, no accommodations.
For the trainees, it meant the difference between paying thousands of pesos out of pocket or spending only for mobile data. For the training unit, it meant slashing manpower costs by 75 percent.
The VLS quickly became more than a pandemic patch. It modernized police training and has been adopted in other police regional offices.
Even now, years after in-person sessions have resumed, PCOL Obar’s successor in Region 3 uses the VLS. More than 3,000 trainees have passed through it; its DNA is in the way the PNP trains its people. Those who know him say the VLS was “typical PCOL Obar” – pragmatic, low profile, and built to last.
Community as force multiplier
In January 2024, PCOL Obar took command as provincial director in Ilocos Norte, a province as varied in geography as in political texture. His initiatives there reflect the same habit of institutional improvisation.
Through “Bridging Communities and Law Enforcement for a Safer Ilocos Norte,” he has built alliances with youth groups, motorcycle clubs, rangers, students, and watchmen – each with a mission, yet adaptable.
“Community partnerships are not just add-ons,” he says. “They are force multipliers, building trust where force alone cannot.”
The Kabataan Kontra Droga at Terorismo (KKDAT), once a youth-led anti-drug program, now serves as a leadership pipeline. The Force Multipliers and Peacekeeper Riders of Ilocos Norte Inc. (FMPRIN), a motorcycle riders’ group for road safety, has expanded into humanitarian work and school outreach. Barangay Ranger Officers train in mountain rescue, while Barangay Tanods use an I-Police app and keep “Protect Boxes” stocked for emergencies.
Elastic leadership style
PCOL Obar works with an elasticity uncommon in a profession known for its rigid hierarchies: a faith in people’s ability to surprise him, offset by his command of the larger design. That design has led him into places where the stakes are counted in lives and millions of pesos.
Before Ilocos Norte, he commanded the Luzon Field Unit and the Intelligence Division of the PNP Anti-Kidnapping Group, a job that could turn on a phone call at midnight.
In November 2022, the call came: foreign nationals held by a casino- and POGO-linked syndicate, the ransom set at P100 million. The victims were freed. The principal suspects were taken in. The network was shaken, though linked abduction rings remain under pursuit.
Beyond the raids
Ilocos Norte has offered a different kind of security challenge. The insurgency has been largely quelled, but keeping it there is a job without end.
PCOL Obar, working with the Philippine Army, has helped capture senior CPP-NPA figures, bolstering the province’s insurgency-free standing.
He also invested in the more prosaic foundations of the force: new facilities, improved accommodations, better equipment. Such work lacks the drama of a raid or the sweep of a community campaign, but, as PCOL Obar understands, a police force that is well housed and well equipped is better able to act when the moment comes.
Systems that endure
Over the course of his career, Obar has shown a preference for systems that endure beyond his tenure. The Virtual Learning System remains in place. The community networks in Ilocos Norte are designed to sustain themselves.
His measure of success is less in personal recognition than in the fact that, for the officers and civilians who use these systems, they have become part of the landscape, no longer seen as his.
In policing, as in much else, the most reliable structures are the ones that hold the weight of everything else without calling attention to themselves. —Metrobank Foundation
