Police Lieutenant Colonel (PLTCOL) Wesley John Rivera Gonzales
Police Lieutenant Colonel (PLTCOL) Wesley John Rivera Gonzales is Officer-in-Charge of the Strategy Review Division of the Philippine National Police (PNP) Center for Police Strategy Management (CPSM), which oversees the continued implementation of the agency’s long-term, balanced scorecard-based transformation program.
As a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow, he will undertake his program in Public Policy Analysis and Public Administration at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He intends to interact with, and learn from, security sector experts and institutions in the US, which includes police departments and educational institutions with Criminal Justice Policy programs, adapting new knowledge gained to the Philippine context.
Wesley entered the Officer Corps of the PNP in 2006. In his eighteen years in the uniformed service, he has worn many different hats and assumed several positions, to include: Deputy Chief of the Regional Human Resource and Doctrine Development Section at the then-Police Regional Office of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (PRO ARMM), Chief of the Intelligence Production Section also at PRO ARMM, Operations Officer at the Sulu Police Provincial Office, Chief-of-Police of the Indanan Municipal Police Station also in Sulu Province, Chief of the Planning and Police-Community Relations Section at the National Headquarters Support Service (HSS), Chief of the Human Resource/Workforce Alignment Section at the CPSM, and, Officer-in-Charge of both the Strategy Review Division and Scorecard Management Division also at said Center. He has been feted as Junior Officer of the Year thrice in his career and, is recipient of various medals, awards and commendations.
A firm believer in the value of continuing education, Wesley earned an AB in Communications from Letran College in 2001, and, a BS in Criminology from the Philippine College of Criminology (PCCr) in 2004. He placed 7th in the Professional Licensure Examination for Criminologists held that same year. Shortly thereafter, he obtained his Master in Public Administration from the University of Santo Tomas (UST), Manila, and, in subsequent years as a member of the force, earned further post-graduate qualifications in Development Management from the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), in Public Management from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and, in Counter-Terrorism from University College London (UCL) in the UK. Upon completing his Humphrey Fellowship, Wesley intends to continue his work in the uniformed service and apply what he has learned to enable the fostering of a good governance-driven organizational culture that is evidence-based, leadership-focused, community-minded, ethically grounded and highly adaptive to the times.