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.
This marks his 13th year in the service - years that have taken him from the slopes of Laguna to the cramped streets of the capital, and now to the highly secured perimeters of the country’s most guarded spaces.
Roots of integrity
His story begins in Calasiao, Pangasinan, influenced quietly by a father who wore the same uniform for 26 years. “I witnessed how he earned the respect of our community through his integrity, discipline, and genuine compassion,” PMSg Velasco says.
He remembers not the sound of sirens but the smaller gestures: his father listening patiently to a farmer’s complaint, accepting a glass of water from a family he had just helped.
“Like him, I wanted to become a police officer with a mission and purpose – to protect the vulnerable and to stand for justice, especially for those who have no voice.”
Most of his career was spent with the 1st Laguna Provincial Mobile Force Company (1st LPMFC), a unit tasked with various responsibilities — from civil disturbance control to anti-terrorism operations, from hostage rescues to responding to natural disasters.
The challenges were constant – limited manpower, strained resources, and the endless, shifting demands of public safety – but PMSg Velasco made a habit of meeting them with innovation.
Strength beyond the field
He was instrumental in crafting the 1st LPMFC Training Development Plan, which gave rise to OPLAN TLS (Train, Learn, and Share), a best-practice program that has sent hundreds of personnel to specialized training – from high-threat emergency care to advanced drone piloting – and embedded a culture of skill-sharing in the unit.
He launched sports-based activities that not only improved physical fitness but also built infrastructure, like the unit’s Tactical Conference Room funded by proceeds from the Mount Bulalo Uphill Challenge.
He recalibrated his unit’s Performance Governance System strategies, redirecting funds that were previously consumed by redundant operations into medical missions, feeding programs, and other community initiatives.
His portfolio of programs reads like a blueprint for police work that is both responsive and preventive.
There’s “Bola Hindi Droga,” a basketball clinic for youth development that trained dozens of children in Bay, Laguna, steering them away from drugs through sports. There’s OPLAN Fusion Hornet, an intelligence-sharing mechanism that closes the gaps between the PNP, AFP, local governments, and other law enforcement agencies.
And then there are the projects born out of crisis: “OPLAN Green Planet,” which over five years yielded thousands of anti-illegal logging operations, cleanup drives, and tree-planting activities; and “OPLAN Handog Gamit Para sa Pagbabalik Eskwela,” which began as an urgent response to pandemic-era educational inequities and has since become a fixture in community outreach.
Small gestures, big impact
One of his most vivid memories comes from the early, frightening months of COVID-19. In a small barangay, he met a boy who was eager to attend online classes but couldn’t afford a cellphone. “Without hesitation, I used my own money to buy him a cellphone and added some school supplies,” PMSg Velasco says. “It may not have seemed like a big gesture to others, but to that child, it meant hope, opportunity, and dignity.”
It is this instinct – to act without spectacle, to measure success in the intangible currency of trust – that runs like a through line in his service.
“It’s never been about recognition or awards,” he says. “Fulfillment comes when I earn the trust of the people I serve, when a mother expresses gratitude for keeping her children safe, when someone simply says, “Salamat po, may pulis.’”
Miles before sunrise
The same discipline that steadies his hand in uniform carries into the other hours of his life. On the mornings when he is not on shift, PMSg Velasco runs.
A national athlete and an ultramarathoner, he wakes before the city, lacing his shoes in the blue half-light. By four a.m., before the heat lifts off the asphalt, he is on the long road out of town – past the half-lit sari-sari stores, past the first panaderia and the smell of bread rising in the dark. He runs the way he works: quiet, deliberate, eyes on the road ahead.
In police work, the measure of success is often what does not happen: the absence of crime, the prevention of harm.
In PMSg Velasco’s record, there is that, but there is also something more: a sustained, almost stubborn effort to build trust, one conversation, one gesture, one green shot at a time.
It is work that resists ceremony; instead, it focuses on being present when it matters most – the way a runner appears at the start line, again and again, ready to carry the course to its end. —Metrobank Foundation
