The dead drug pushers were all poor shots!

It is my daily habit to watch television news to greet the dawn hours of my waking. From changing national and international channels every now and then, I hope to hear more of the good kind of news while I prepare myself for the unexpected. Reports of great human achievements inspire me to contribute to society whatever modest and however imperceptible things I can.  But, when horrific events flash on the screen, I tend to look to salvage that which is positive rather than dwell on the negative.

Not long after I switched my TV set the other early morning, I got startled by what I saw on the screen. There have been about 704 of the so-called drug personalities who have been felled by bullets! It was a collation of reports nationwide by a television giant. Since there was no contradicting news, I assumed that the figure released was correct.

These are casualties in the bloody war against illegal drug trade that President Rodrigo Roa Duterte is waging. We might not have reached the catastrophic level of drug addiction that Mexico and Columbia were at the height of Chapo's pervasive drug trade, but the registered kills in our country are equally alarming.

This statistical datum of 704 deaths, counts only the drug pushers.According to the reports, these men were mostly caught during intelligence operations called  "buy-bust" and when they realized that they were dealing with police authorities they, at their earliest opportunity, drew their guns and decided to fight it out. And because the policemen were fired upon, they returned the fire.

I may be a bit naïve. It is therefore not difficult for me to accept what is being peddled. That policemen are only trying to protect themselves is the official story. Being peace officers, it is part of their rules of engagement not to shoot first. They only use their firearm when their lives are in danger.

On that premise, let us review the most common scene. Records of cases reaching the Supreme Court always tell us that most often, policemen conducting buy-bust operations, are in teams of three.  A decoy, meaning a policeman trying to impersonate a drug user, approaches a suspected pusher and negotiates to buy the merchandise, usually shabu, a common name because the medical term is impossible to pronounce. His comrades keep a distance as not to arouse suspicion. When the exchange is done, the decoy-policeman executes a pre-arranged signal and the rest of the team rush forward to pounce on the peddler. The objective of the policemen is to arrest the pusher not to maim him. That is why do not even pull their guns from the holsters. No, not yet.

According to the reports made, it is at that precise time when the deal is done that the pusher realizes the predicament he is in. Accordingly, his reaction is to draw his gun and shoot at the onrushing policemen. In other words, the first shot comes from the pusher and the next volleys from the authorities.

Despite my naiveté, I am hard put in believing that none of the 704 fatalities scored a hit. Are they really that poor shots? If it is true that the pushers who were killed by uniformed men were the ones who shot first, how come that not one of the policemen ever got hit? They could not be farther than 5 meters from one another! Missing a target from that point blank range is just unthinkable.

No, do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that I would rather that our peace officers are hit.Of course not. Like everyone else, I want our peace officers out of harm's way.   I am only trying to say that this kind of a scene, as reported, assaults our sense of reality. I believe that in most of such reported incidents, no encounters actually took place. They were summary executions, mostly. Yes I condemn drug pushers, but our authorities need not take short cuts.

We still can win the war against illegal drug traders, especially now that there seems to be a surging public awareness of the perils of drug addiction, but let us not forget that our laws have set up systems on how to deal with them. No one of the 704 can testify how he was shot at, but it behooves upon the policemen to consider that those fatalities were also human beings entitled to certain rights.