Philippine National Police Chief Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa said the crime rate across the country has dropped by some 49 percent (or almost half) compared to the crime rate last year. Apparently, majority of crimes in the country are drug-related since the crime rate drop happened when the PNP started its aggressive anti-drugs campaign.
“This only goes to show that most of these crimes that are happening in our communities are drug-related. That’s why when we focused our resources and attention on the drug problem, crimes also dropped,” Dela Rosa told hundreds of police officers in a speech at Camp Alagar Police Regional Headquarters.
Street crimes like theft, robbery (snatching and hold-up) and domestic violence like rape and other abuses are often drug-related. Once the drug trade is addressed, it has a domino-effect on other crimes.
“Our assessment points to the link and direct effect of the diminished presence of illegal drugs in the streets as a result of the intensified anti-illegal [drug] campaign,” PNP-10 spokesperson Supt. Surki Sereñas explained.
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However, the war against illegal drugs in the country has recently been marred by what some people strongly suspect as extrajudicial killings—or street killings done without due process of law. And the worse news is that none of these cases have been solved as of this writing.
The PNP—specifically its Directorate for Investigative and Detective Management (DIDM)—has admitted that no drug-related summary killings have yet been solved. The number of these unsolved cases has increased to 500 individuals who were killed at the height of the government’s anti-drugs campaign.
“As of now, our records show that none of the cases has been resolved. We have leads for some but not all,” Senior Supt. Fausto Manzanilla Jr. was quoted by the Inquirer as saying, admitted the dilemma during a press briefing held at Camp Crame. The cases are still under investigation.
On the other hand, GMA News monitoring reported that 556 people said to be linked to drugs have been killed since the Duterte administration started on August 11. Of this number, 326 were killed by the police and other law enforcers during operations. The remaining 230 were killed by still unidentified suspects.
Manzanilla said the PNP has no concrete evidence yet to show whether these unidentified suspects were vigilantes. “As of now, I don’t have knowledge on vigilante group. But these (cases) are subjected to a deeper investigation,” Manzanilla said.
He assured the public that an investigation is started whenever a crime or suspicious killing incident is reported. But investigation is a long process. “Investigation is an arduous task wherein we cannot immediately come up with a result in just a short span of time. Our investigation should be evidence based. We don’t want to come up with the result of an investigation where an innocent person will be included,” Manzanilla said.
Sources: (gmanetwork.com, newsinfo.inquirer.net, philstar.com)
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