In February, a few months before he would take the Philippine presidency in phenomenal fashion, Rodrigo Duterte was quoted as saying that he would grant pardon to law enforcers who might end up killing criminals while carrying out the new regime's social cleansing campaign.
This month, he repeated this statement. Only by this time, Duterte has also said he would double the pay of the members of the police force. Until that happens, the administration could significantly increase the police "hazard pay" for putting their lives on the line. Meanwhile, the drug war will continue, and any talk of an investigation into the alarming number of deaths will not be entertained.
At present, Philippine society is at war. It is officially a war against drugs -- a campaign to rid the nation of its dregs. It is being commandeered by a man we elected. And on its frontline is the national Police force, the people's supposed protector.
However, a look at the records will remind us of just what sort of institution it is that Duterte has chosen to be in the frontline of his campaign.
Just in 2014, Amnesty International published a report that reminded us about who the national Police is. “Torture is still rife, … the overwhelming majority of reports of torture involve police officers.” And yet the content of that report itself is not new. It merely put real faces into a phenomenon that is, as it wrote, the Philippine's “dark, open secret.”
Faces like those of Alfreda Disbarro, a former police asset who the police took and brought to a room. On top of her head, they placed a bottle which they threatened to blow to bits if she would not do what they wanted her to do. Later they forced a dirty mop into her mouth, while beating her on the side. They wanted Disbarro to admit to being a drug pusher.
The report presented data from the Commission on Human Rights which has recorded a total of 457 cases of torture all over the Philippines since 2001. The highest figure was in 2013 when 75 torture cases were reported, 60 of which implicated the Police. The Philippines passed an Anti-Torture Law in 2009. Not a single person in authority has been convicted.
That report pointed out that, to begin with, cases involving the police are underreported and almost undocumented. But in 2010, another report, from The Asia Foundation, stated another kind of police involvement in condemnable acts that cast doubt on their supposed job description of protecting the citizens – extrajudicial killings.
Like the AI report, their data were likewise gathered from 2001, until 2010. They recorded 390 victims of extrajudicial killings. Of the 837 suspects, 9% were attributed to the Police – third only to the military, another state actor, and the New People's Army.
But in fact the hand of the police is tainted even in deaths attributed to the armed forces. Highlighting a similarity with another country whose main killers were police death squads, Kenya, the report noted that victims killed in the Philippines were identified beforehand and killed in remote areas after being detained first by the police. Majority of the victims in the Philippines were identified as legal political activists – activists who first get handcuffed by the police and get brought to their stations.
What is the Police, and who does it serve? In the Philippines, it traces its roots in the Spanish civil guards whose cruelty toward Filipinos the national hero Jose Rizal depicted in his books. But the current police force as we know it descends from the Philippine Constabulary, an institution which co-emerged with American rule in the country. Thus, in the Philippines, policing has in fact functioned as a tool of foreign oppression against the natives.
When the colonizers left, its control was handed over to the local ruling elites. It was the same PC that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos would inherit and would use efficiently. After Marcos was thrown out, police control was handed over to the Department of Interior and Local Government, occasionally figuring in scandals ("Euro Generals" corruption case; the Maguindanao Massacre) and from time to time showing its ineptness, as in the botched rescue mission of Hong Kong bus hostages in Manila in 2010.
The police has been a feared figure in the everyday lives of Filipinos -- a steady presence that exists to protect the ruling elite's banks and malls, and who disperse political rallies against the Philippine's social ills.
The Police has been understood as “an instrument for regulating the lower orders.” As such, it is an institution of force. But according to Richard Seymour, properly understanding the role of the police has to take into account what exactly it defends: “What they're doing is exerting violence and coercion not only in defense of the legal and juridical forms of capitalist social relations, but in the defense of a moral and symbolic order, which expresses their own relationships to the dominant ideology, to the institutions they work in, the (professional middle) class they belong to, and to the social world they police.”
A violent social order where the poorest families – millions of them – subsist on P5,750 every month and the richest families earn ten times as much, breeds instability -- and more violence. And the police is a violent state element precisely because it was designed to be so.
But if the police, on an average day, already exhibit these tendencies. What it could do under the guise of the drug war, and in the hands of Duterte, points only to a more anti-people trajectory.
Already, the numbers are troubling. According to the Citizen's Council for Human Rights, from January 1 to May 9 this year, prior to Duterte's election, number of reported deaths from drug-related violence was 39. After May 10, in just two months, this number has risen to 251.
And who are the victims? Those we know of paint a grim picture. Stories like those of Jefferson Bunuan, a scholar of a local NGO who was brutally killed in a "buy-bust" operation. A criminology student, he dreamed of being a policeman. Stories in the Philippine social media of people arrested just because they "looked like" the bad guy.
Already, the groundwork for a regime where especially the shabby-clothed, the tattooed, the un-schooled, the different, the people with the least capability to defend themselves -- are easily carted off to numberless rooms by gun- and baton-wielding men in uniform. They have a name for this. This is called “law enforcement.” Meanwhile, the public cheers and eggs the president on, reveling in the new-found “peace and order,” which is in fact nothing more than the slow surrender of all our freedoms as a civilized people. The country is dancing into lawlessness, and the Police and other armed men are keeping the beat.
Because early on, Rodrigo Duterte himself has shown how little his regard is for the concept of “human rights.” When the police he leads swoops down on another poverty-stricken community to smoke out the drug den, the right of supposed suspects to not get whacked, to not get arrested without charges, to be presumed innocent at first – to just be respected as human beings – will not be nearest their minds.
If President Rodrigo Duterte is really serious in helping build a fairer Philippine society, he should stop emboldening and empowering the very same forces that threaten the masses.
Meanwhile, we have to study another form of society – one that does not use force and brutality just so it could impose order amidst the inequalities of Capitalism.
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