In its latest quarterly survey last June 23-26, Social Weather Stations asked respondents if they agreed with the statement that “Many of those killed by the police in the anti-drug campaign did not really fight against the police.”
The statement was awkwardly phrased, of course. But perhaps that was only because it may have been an overly literal translation from the original Tagalog that might have read as follows (we’re guessing, not having seen the actual language itself): “Karamihan ng mga napatay ng pulis sa kampanya laban sa droga ay hindi talaga nanlaban [pumalag?] sa mga pulis.”
Regardless of construction issues, the statement seems clear enough to have prompted 54 percent of the respondents to answer that they agreed with it. As a matter of fact, 20 percent of them strongly agreed.
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Expectedly, the usual suspects went to town on this. The folks at Human Rights Watch crowed that the survey supported the “critical mass of compelling evidence” that they say they’ve gathered about “an unlawful killing campaign.”
Even the usual allies of the administration in the Senate, having already signed on earlier to a minority-initiated resolution “condemning the killings,” continued to keep their distance. The Senate President said that trust in, and credibility of, the PNP among the senators was “nil.” And Senator Lacson, a former PNP chief, flat-out advised the police to “go back to the drawing board and perfect your operations.”
At this point, and after the spate of teenage killings in Caloocan, nobody can seriously dispute the presence of rogue cops in the force. General Bato himself pegged the number at 2 percent, which means a couple of thousand cops, certainly enough to drag down the reputation of the entire organization.
The NCR police commander, General Oscar Albayalde, has gone ahead and replaced the entire Caloocan police force. If only we could be sure that all of the 2 percent bad apples could be found in Caloocan. But that of course is highly unlikely, leaving Albayalde with a lot of unaddressed mess still to be cleaned up.
The majority opinion solicited by SWS obviously supports the existence of rogue cops. But inferring as well that it also supports the existence of “an unlawful killing campaign” that started only after Duterte became president is another thing entirely. It betrays a willful misunderstanding of the history and reality of the urban poor in this country.
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It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the highest agreement with the statement was found among respondents in Metro Manila (63 percent) and those belonging to the lowest socioeconomic Class E (58 percent). That’s because of the simple historical fact that the urban poor have always mistrusted the police.
That mistrust has been part of their culture long before Duterte became president. It’s not even unique to the Philippines. The same perceptions can also be found among the poor in other countries as well.
Is it because it is naturally easier for those in power, uniformed and armed, to abuse their authority around those who are powerless and cannot fight back? That’s a reasonable hypothesis to make about human nature. And so the path to reform by the PNP becomes clear:
Train and lead police officers to take the more difficult route of mastering their worst instincts instead of just giving in. And put painful penalties in place for officers who can’t or won’t do that.
That’s the proper interpretation of the significance of the SWS findings, not from some foreign ideological, or domestic partisan, agenda.
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Many of the urban poor may believe in the capacity of policemen to commit such excesses. For them, this is nothing new anymore.
What IS new for them is the experience, being reported from many of their communities, that crime rates have drastically dropped since the drug war started; that other forms of public misbehavior, like gambling and drinking and general rowdiness, have also gone down; that they feel much safer about walking their streets by day or night.
The war against drugs is meting out a very rough form of justice, of course, with much potential for collateral damage and abuse of power. But roughness is something the poor are used to. Justice is something they’re much less familiar with.
For those of us who aren’t poor and don’t live in that reality, we ought to put ourselves in their shoes as best we can. Otherwise we’ll be scratching our heads again when the next surveys come out showing that Duterte’s personal trust and popularity ratings have hardly been dented by whatever his policemen may or may not have done.
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