THE Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, an anti-crime group, has been one of the most outspoken supporters of the Duterte administration’s war on illegal drugs, so when it speaks out against the “collateral damage” being done, the government should listen.
The impetus for the VACC’s statement comes from the killing of seven people, including four teens and a pregnant woman, by armed masked men looking for a drug suspect in Bagong Silang, Caloocan City on Dec. 27.
In that incident, a group of young men were dancing in a house that was reportedly a drug den when the masked gunmen barged in and started shooting. The assailants then followed one of the men who fled to a nearby house, where a pregnant woman and her mother-in-law were also killed.
Police reports said five people died instantly when the gunmen opened fire on those inside the house. Two others died before reaching the hospital.
Reports said four of those killed were teenagers, two of them 15, one 16 and one 18, in what police reported as the result of a gang war.
However, Dante Jimenez, VACC founding chairman, said the incident was not the result of a gang war, but a covert police operation based on witnesses’ accounts.
“We went to the area because of our concern about those teenagers being involved in drug use, trafficking or pushing. In four places we’d gone to, three of the minors were confirmed not [to be] using drugs, according to their relatives and neighbors,” he said.
“We also went to the barangay to investigate, and found out only one of the teenage boys had tried using drugs just once.”
He said five of the fatalities just happened to be in the area of the police operation.
“In our initial assessment, I think there have been many people who became what President Rodrigo Duterte called… collateral damage. And we call them collateral victims. They are the ones who get caught in a crossfire. Some are just a case of mistaken identity,” he said.
Jimenez, a supporter of the administration, urged the President to create a special task force composed of police officers and prosecutors to look into the deaths of innocent people.
It is time for President Duterte to listen.
He can continue to blindly insist that the police version of such incidents is always correct, but this would isolate him from the people and the truth.
In the last six months, more than 6,000 people have been killed in the bloody war on drugs—averaging 39 deaths a day. On Dec. 27, it seems, at least seven of those people—or about 18 percent of the daily average death rate—were “collateral damage,” a military euphemism that dehumanizes people who shouldn’t have been killed but were.
What is an acceptable level of “collateral damage”? Even at 5 percent, that would translate to 300 people who didn’t have to die, but did—all in the name of the President’s unrelenting war on drugs.
Nobody is suggesting that the war be called off; we do insist, however, that the police make it their goal to ensure that no innocent bystanders are killed, and that when they are, a proper accounting be made to the people.
After all, in our democratic system, regardless of what Mr. Duterte wishes or thinks, the police are still accountable to the people.
