9 drug offenders killed daily — PNP

MANILA, Philippines - An average of nine drug offenders have been killed daily since last year when President Duterte assumed office and unleashed a vicious campaign against drugs, Philippine National Police (PNP) records show.

PNP spokesman Chief Supt. Dionardo Carlos said the figure showed the police are on track in the campaign against illegal drugs. Many drug offenders ended up dead after fighting it out with law enforcers trying to arrest them, the PNP said.

“We are delivering results. We are on track with our target that we set, that we would like to achieve in Double Barrel Reloaded and after June 30 we will have another assessment and look at what would be the next step forward in the program, because at first it was six months but what we discovered was the magnitude of the problem,” he said.

Based on PNP records, 3,151 people have been killed in the course of the drug war from July 1, 2016 to June 13, 2017 or 348 days.

The PNP Public Information Office said the PNP is still consolidating statistics from June 14 up to June 30, or exactly a year after the President assumed office.

“This will be the one-year accomplishment of the PNP pertaining to its campaign against drugs, criminality, corruption, internal cleansing and administrative accomplishments, recruitment, logistics, police community relations activities and our commitment to other agencies and other international bodies,” he said.

“We expect the final report to be released by Monday or Tuesday, given to the chief PNP,” he added.

“There were less suspects getting killed and our personnel involved in the anti-drug operations are accountable and we want it more transparent by involving other sectors that are interested, so we opened Oplan Tokhang operations with other sectors like the religious sector, human rights, NGOs and other groups that would want to first-hand experience how the tokhang is being done,” he added.

The PNP said 2,429 kilos of shabu with street-value of P12.49 billion and P18.40 billion worth of shabu paraphernalia have been seized during the period.

Under the #RealNumbersPH Data on Anti-Drug Campaign of the government, the PNP conducted a total of 62,751 anti-drug operations and arrested 84,467 drug suspects. A total of 1,306,389 drug personalities have surrendered. – Cecille Suerte Felipe, Delon Porcalla, Evelyn Macairan, Emmanuel Tupas