Police Use of Deadly Force in the Philippines
Comparing Levels and Patterns Before and Since Duterte
Abstract
This article provides a detailed analysis of pre-Duterte and Duterte police use of deadly force in the Philippines. It first develops a set of indicators that allow for assessing the magnitude of police use of deadly force in “armed encounters”, its relation to the threat environments in which the police operate, and the lethality of such violence. Then, based on a self-developed dataset for the pre-Duterte decade and the ABS-CBN dataset on Duterte period police killings, it establishes the past and current patterns of police use of deadly force. The analysis shows that in the past decade as under Duterte inter-provincial spatial and temporal variation of police use of deadly force has been very high. Differences in the threat environment play only a minor role in explaining this variation. Differences in sub-national units’ reactions to the Duterte campaign mirror those in police use of deadly force during the earlier decade, signaling strong path-dependency. Lethality-levels have been outstanding in both periods despite dramatically differing levels of lethal violence. Clearly, Philippine police tended to shoot-to-kill already before Duterte granted them a carte blanche.
References
ABS-CBN News. (n.d.). Map, charts: The death toll of the war on drugs. Retrieved from https://news.abs-cbn.com/specials/map-charts-the-death-toll-of-the-war-on-drugs
Alston, P. (2008a). Report of the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philipp Alston: Summary. UN-Document A/HRC/8/3. Retrieved from http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/8session/A-HRC-8-3.doc
Alston, P. (2008b). Report of the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philipp Alston: Addendum Mission to the Philippines. UN-Document A/HRC/8/3/Add2. Retrieved from https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G08/130/01/PDF/G0813001.pdf?OpenElement
Alston, P. (2009). Report of the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philipp Alston: Addendum. UN-Document A/HRC/11/2/Add.8. Retrieved from https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G09/130/39/PDF/G0913039.pdf?OpenElement
Amnesty International. (2019). ‘They just kill’: Ongoing extrajudicial ececutions and other violations in the Philippines’ ‘war on drugs’. Retrieved from https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ASA3505782019ENGLISH.PDF
Breuil, B. C. O., & Rozema R. (2009). Fatal imaginations: Death squads in Davao City and Medellín compared. Crime, Law and Social Change, 52(4), 405-424.
Bulacan Philippine National Police. (2017). 8 Armed drug pushers killed, 12 arrested as cops wounded in Bulacan police operations. Retrieved from http://bulacanpnp.com/news%20press%20release%20JUN%202017.html#JUNE302017
Bulacan Philippine National Police. (n.d.). Bulacan’s Accomplishments. Originally retrieved from https:// bulacanpnp.com/ (no longer online since July 2019); most recent accessible version https://web.archive.org/web/20190718100846/https://bulacanpnp.com/)
Chevigny, P. G. (1991). Police deadly force as social control. Jamaica, Brazil, Argentina. In M. Huggins (Ed.), Vigilantism and the state in modern Latin America: Essays on extralegal violence (pp. 189-218), New York: Praeger.
Chevigny, P. G. (1990). Police deadly force as social control. Jamaica, Argentina, and Brazil. Criminal Law Forum, 1(3), 389-425.
Congress of the Philippines. (1990). Republic Act No. 6975: An act establishing the Philippine National Police under a reorganized Department of the Interior and Local Government, and for other purposes. Retrieved from https://www.lawphil.net/statutes/repacts/ra1990/ra_6975_1990.html
Congress of the Philippines. (1998). Republic Act No. 8551: An Act for Providing for the freedom and re- organization of the Philippine National Police and for other purposes, amending certain provisions of Republic Act numbered sixty-nine hundred and seventy-five entitled “an act establishing the Philippine National Police under a re-organized Department of the Interior and Local Government, and for other purposes”. Retrieved from: https://www.lawphil.net/statutes/repacts/ra1998/ra_8551_1998.html
Coronel, S. S. (2017). Murder as enterprise. Police profiteering in Duterte’s war on drugs. In N. Curato (Ed.), A Duterte reader. Critical essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s early presidency (pp. 167-198). Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Curato, N. (2016). Politics of anxiety, politics of hope. Penal populism and Duterte’s rise to power. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 35(3), 91-109.
David, C. C., Mendoza, R. U., Atun, J. M. L., Cossid, R. P. N., & Soriano C. R. R. (2018). The Philippines’ anti- drug campaign: Building a dataset of publicly-available Information on killings with the anti-drug campaign. Ateneo School of Government Working Paper 18-001. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3201814
Forné, C. S., Pérez Correa, C., & Rivas R. G. (n.d.). Índice de letalidad 2008-2014. Disminuyen los enfrentami- entos, misma letalidad, aumenta la opacidad [Decreasing encounters, same lethality, increasing opacity]. Retrieved from http://www.elfaro.net/attachment/913/%C3%8Dndice%20de%20letalidad%202008-2014%20(M%C3%A9xico).pdf
Free Legal Assistance Group. (2007). Extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions in the Philippines, 2001- 2006. Retrieved from http://philrights.org/oldsite/images/Extrajudicial,%20Summary%20or%20Arbitrary%20Executions%20in%20the%20Philippines,%202001-2006.doc
Human Rights Watch (2009). “You can die any time”. Death squad killings in Mindanao. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/philippines0409webwcover_0.pdf
Jensen, S., & Hapal, K. (2018). Police violence and corruption in the Philippines. Violent exchange and the war on drugs. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 37(2), 39-62.
Kreuzer, P. (2012). Mafia-style domination: The Philippine province of Pampanga. Peace Research Institute Frankfurt PRIF-Report No. 114. Retrieved from https://www.hsfk.de/fileadmin/HSFK/hsfk_downloads/prif114.pdf
National Bureau of Investigation. (2013). NBI probe report on the Atimonan, Quezon incident: Executive report. Retrieved from http://www.gov.ph/downloads/2013/03mar/20130306-NBI-Report-Atimonan-Quezon.pdf (no longer online)
National Competitiveness Council Philippines. (n.d.). Cities and municipalities index. Retrieved from https://www.competitive.org.ph/cmcindex/pages/historical/?lgu= followed by the name of the local government unit, which had to be added manually (no longer online available)
Parreño, A. A. (2011). Report on the Philippine extrajudicial killings 2001-2010. Retrieved from https://www.asiafoundation.org/resources/pdfs/ReportonPhilippineEJK20012010.pdf
Picardal, A. (2016). The victims of the Davao Death Squad. Consolidated report 1998-2015. CBCPNews. Retrieved from http://www.cbcpnews.com/cbcpnews/?p=76531
Philippine National Police. (n.d.). #RealNumbersPH update. Retrieved from http://www.pnp.gov.ph/images/2017News/realnumbers/rn_731.pdf
Philippine Statistics Authority. (2016). Highlights of the Philippine Population 2015 Census of Population. Retrieved from https://psa.gov.ph/content/highlights-philippine-population-2015-census-population
Reyes, D. A. (2016). The spectacle of violence in Duterte’s “war on drugs”. In: Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. 35(3), 111-137.
Sidel, J. T. (1999). Capital, coercion, and crime. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
The Guardian. (n.d.). The counted. People killed by police in the US. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
The Washington Post. (n.d.). Fatal force. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/; (direct link to the dataset: https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings/blob/master/fatal-police-shootings-data.csv)
Copyright (c) 2019 Society for South-East Asian Studies (SEAS)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Articles published before December 2019 are licensed under the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Articles published after that date are licensed under the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International.
