Fearful of cops, not of criminals

What does one make of the latest poll on drug killings?

Eighty-five percent of Filipinos approve of the Duterte admin’s bloody war on drugs. Philippine National Police director-general Bato dela Rosa takes that to mean people feel safe from street crimes by druggies.

Yet 78 percent also fear getting killed in the crossfire. Duterte critics say that’s because of the daily gun slayings of mere drug suspects.

So, could it be that Filipinos are afraid of being victims not of drug-crazed criminals, but of trigger-happy cops? Plausible, based on statistics.

Never in the past 15 years of the drug problem has any admin battled it head-on like President Rodrigo Duterte is now doing. From July 1 to Dec. 18 police conducted 39,358 raids and buy-busts. Packed off to crowded jails were 41,575 pushers. Cops also visited 5,339,475 homes to warn known druggies to desist. That made 940,803 surrender to the cops or barangay chiefs for drug rehab, if and when money, facilities, and doctors become available.

Heinous crimes like rape and robbery-with-homicide dropped 49 percent, along with street muggings and porch climbing (akyat-bahay). Female workers and students attest on mainstream and social media being able to walk the streets at night with no drunks harassing them. Cabbies report near-zero holdups.

Then comes the gory part. Nearly 6,000 drug suspects were killed in the same period. More than one-third, 2,124, were in police raids, in which the fatalities allegedly had fought back with a rusty .38-caliber revolver. “Nanlaban gamit ang kalawanging .38” was the usual police report. Half of those slain, 2,928, were by hooded anti-drug vigilantes. About 850 were murders by guns-for-hire, likely unrelated to drugs. “R-I-T,” or riding in tandem on getaway motorcycles, the police call the modus operandi.

The police label the vigilante and non-drug murders as D.U.I.s, or deaths under investigation. Crime solution is spotty, dela Rosa admits. Sen. Panfilo Lacson, a former PNP head, advises him to form a task force of intelligence and investigative aces to focus on the non-police killings. Dela Rosa has yet to comply.

The Dept. of Interior’s Internal Affairs service, meanwhile, has its hands full automatically probing the police killings. Terribly undermanned, the IAS has managed to certify about two-thirds of the 2,124 cases as legitimate, not contrived, shootouts.

Compounding the fearful atmosphere is the police’s dismal murder solution rate. R-I-T street assassinations have been rising for years now. The PNP reported 1,819 fatal attacks by motorcycled killers in 2010, and 2,089 in 2011. Unchecked by good sleuthing, the murders-for-hire zoomed to about 3,000 in 2013, and 4,000 in 2014. Likely some of those were drug-related, either by emergent vigilantes or competing narco-gangs. But there were no breakdowns. Records were frazzled as the Interior Secretary and PNP chief then infamously were feuding.

A recent retiree from the PNP-Criminal Investigation and Detection Group admits that less than half of the murders were solved. An officer of the National Bureau of Investigation adds that many of the cases they solved were only because “high profile.” That is, the victim was a prominent personalities or the incident was prominent news.

And now, in the second half of 2016, there are 4000 vigilante- and non-drug killings. Index crimes are down but homicides are up.

So engrossed is the PNP with the drug war that it has hardly found time to pause for retraining, especially in solving homicides. Dela Rosa seems impatient with the tedious process of internal discipline. His solution to policemen testing positive for “shabu” (methamphetamine hydrochloride) is to throw them to Mindanao. It’s like casting the turtle to the sea. When reassigned, crooked cops go AWOL to become full-time criminals.

Duterte does not help assuage public fears. In warning drug lords of unrelenting war, he acknowledges that citizens would be caught in the crossfire, for which he’s sorry. Yet there has been no news of what, if ever, he has done for such innocents, especially three toddlers shot dead by police bullets. More worrisome, Duterte took the side of the cops whom senators and the NBI concluded to have rubbed out the detained drug indictee Mayor Rolando Espinosa of Leyte. He also extolled the assassination while in police custody in a crowded seaport of the spouses Melvin and Miriam Odicta, reported to be the Panay region’s top narco-traffickers. Frequently he vows mechanically to defend any policeman or soldier in a shootout. Such words, people believe, tend to encourage extrajudicial killings.

And so Filipinos cheer the kill statistics in the drug war, but also fear being killed then get no justice.

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