I was pleased when a drug dealer at the end of my street was shot dead by one of his customers because the guys still alive all went to prison. Life was better for all of the rest of us not having the constant traffic, noise, and fear from that house. If the police had dropped by to kill the drug dealer, I would be living in a frightening, untenable world. People who murder are criminals.

You are proud to lack traditional American values structured around three healthy branches of government. You live in the wrong country.


MANILA—All Jefferson Soriano wanted was to go to bed. But the power was out, his tiny room felt like a furnace, and his friend Manuel Borbe had come by. The pair walked outside to chat and get some air, eventually stopping for a late-night coffee along a busy road.

Soriano and Borbe had lived nearly their entire lives in the area, a shantytown in a Manila community called Holy Spirit, and had met as teens on a neighborhood basketball court. They had been friends ever since, growing up together, and now both were new fathers in their 30s struggling to make ends meet—Soriano by working odd jobs in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants, Borbe as a construction worker.

At the time, Rodrigo Duterte’s first year as president of the Philippines was coming to a close, a violent period during which the government prosecuted a war on drugs, in which police swept down, arrested suspected drug sellers, and conducted sting operations against them. Officers were given wide latitude to shoot, and kill, suspected drug dealers—ostensibly in self defense—and Holy Spirit was one of the offensive’s epicenters.

Soriano and Borbe had themselves been caught up in police raids: The former had been reported for his contact with drug dealers, the latter had previously surrendered to police and admitted that he was a user of crystal meth, or shabu. In fact, just a month before, policemen had barged into Soriano’s home while he was in the bathroom naked and dragged him outside as he begged for his life. They took him to the police station and, he says, beat him as they questioned him about his association with drug dealers.

So that night—June 15, 2017—Borbe was anxious, worried for his wife and infant son were he to be arrested, or worse, killed. “My time,” he told Soriano as they sipped coffee, “will soon be up.”

While they sat and chatted, a car drove past, its headlights casting a glow on a tall, well-built man standing on the corner on the opposite side of the street. He was soon joined by another man, who arrived on a motorcycle. Each was clad in the same attire—a dark jacket, shorts, and a balaclava.

“Bro, cops,” Soriano told Borbe, believing that the men, despite their face coverings, were police officers. Their stocky build, their posture—hands on their sides, as though they were about to draw their guns—reminded him of the many policemen he’d had run-ins with over the years. Before either friend could do anything, one of the men raised his arm and fired a pistol. Borbe slumped to the ground, taking a fatal shot to the head. Soriano tried to run, but other shooters were waiting at nearby street corners, and fired at him from different directions, hitting him in the neck and leg. As he lay bleeding on the pavement, pretending to be dead, Soriano recalls, he heard the gunmen mount their motorcycles to flee, only for one of the bikes not to start, forcing two of the men to push it downhill to get away.

“The only thought I had in my mind then,” he said in an interview this year in Manila, where he is in hiding, fearing for his life, “was that I had to live for the sake of my son.”

Borbe’s death was posted on the police blotter and investigators were sent to the scene. Journalists arrived shortly after and reported the incident in the news. Photographs were taken, showing Borbe’s corpse splayed on the street corner, the blood from his head wound flowing into the storm drain.

Yet this well-publicized killing is not included in any official count of drug casualties. It has not been fully investigated. It is unclear who the shooters were. As we have found, that is far from unusual: Borbe is only one among a huge number of uncounted victims of Duterte’s drug war.

Elected in 2016 pledging to crack down on drug use, Duterte has now passed the halfway point of his six-year presidency. In that time, the president has employed populist tactics such as naming and shaming 150 judges, mayors, and police generals he says coddled drug dealers and releasing a list of 46 government officials running for office he claims were involved in illegal narcotics. Local officials across the Philippines are required to list suspected drug users and monitor their progress kicking the habit, while police stations must maintain watch lists of alleged drug suspects who are under surveillance. Duterte has assured the police that he has their backs, telling them, “You are free to kill the idiots” who violently resist arrest.

But at what cost? The police say they have killed some 5,500 drug suspects in stings and other legitimate police operations in the past three years, and that unknown gunmen have killed more than 3,000 other drug suspects, amounting to a tenth of the nearly 30,000 homicides carried out in the Philippines since Duterte’s drug war began. (The police blame the drug-linked killings on narcotics syndicates; human-rights groups say these executions are often the work of off-duty cops or hired guns on the police payroll.)

An investigation carried out by the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism shows, however, that these figures are a gross underestimation of the extent of drug-related killings in the Philippines. The data we have collected—based on documents and reporting on homicides, as well as multiple visits to neighborhoods where the killings took place—illustrate how large numbers of killings of drug suspects, by both police and unidentified shooters, have been excluded from official counts: In three municipal areas of Metro Manila, the sprawling Philippine capital of 13 million people, our data show that half of all homicides recorded by the police were tied to illicit narcotics, contrary to police claims that only a small proportion were related to drugs. In addition, we found hundreds of homicides that were not on the police record at all.

This discrepancy goes beyond a question of correctly labeling or reporting incidents of violence, and instead points to concerns about how this war on drugs is being carried out. Is what is taking place in the Philippines an anti-crime campaign, or something darker, in which large numbers of people are being denied due process, targeted for assassination, and offered little in the way of help to quit drug use, while the underlying issues driving the problem are left unaddressed? Filipinos themselves said soon after Duterte took office that, while they applauded the push against narcotics, it was important that suspects be arrested, not killed.


https://www.theatlantic.com/interna...ippines-dead-rodrigo-duterte-drug-war/595978/

 

Hey, tink, sorry I left you alone that long to fight that battle. She just makes me so sick, I don't know how you do it. I would like to hope she doesn't really want a criminal police force, and she just got caught up in her obnoxious need to defend her ugliness. Unfortunately, I know from her previous posts that she is just as racist as she says she is, for example. None of that was just to defend a defenseless bankrupt morality, so now I always believe her when she claims any ugly stance as her true belief.