We don’t know whether there was adequate basis for the claim that Filipinos now feel safer walking on the streets because the crime rate has gone down. The implication is that people are now more trusting of the police’s ability to enforce the law and that criminals are less confident that they could get away with their dark deeds.
We have no scientific data, either, but anecdotal evidence points to a general sense of foreboding as members of the Philippine National Police and other groups crack down on those accused of using and dealing illegal drugs.
The feeling stems from the knowledge that the more than 3,000 suspected dealers and users killed after President Rodrigo Duterte came to power were not accorded due process and were simply executed— just because authorities claimed they “resisted.”
These days, it is difficult to trust that you will be safe from false accusations—even if you happen to just stay home, stand idly on the street, or if you look just a bit scruffier than the ordinary person.
There are horror stories that tell us the police, eager to show that the war against illegal drugs is working, stop at nothing in their pursuit of drug users or dealers in their daily operations.
Authorities appear so infallible that nobody would dare question them when they claim that a “suspect” had sachets of drugs in his possession or resisted arrest.
Make no mistake about it: We are all for ridding society of the drug menace. But not at the cost of casting fear even among the innocent, those who are simply getting by from one day to the next.
It may be true that the crime rate has gone down, but the people are not just afraid of criminals in plain clothes anymore. They are deathly scared of being trapped in the system where authorities are in control, right or wrong, and there is nothing anybody can do to show otherwise. Case in point: deaths inside prison cells, whether of prominent mayors accused of drug dealing or petty criminals, who have been arrested and supposedly preparing to face trial.
This quiet is neither safety nor peace. It is terror—and it is terror inflicted by the state, and by the people who are supposed to make us feel truly safe in the first place. We resist, with all our might, the feeling this occasions in us.
