AN OVERVIEW OF POLICE BRUTALITY IN THE PHILIPPINES: LIVING AND

WORKING IN A STATE OF FEAR

By: Glaiza May S. Moises

Mark Jude Bulatao

Krizzel Pil
 INTRODUCTION

Police brutality has occurred all throughout the world and is nevertheless a principle

subject amongst society and police organizations. It includes assaults, loss of life as an end result

of force, harassment, etc. This brutality takes two types, which is bodily brutality which include

assaults and non-physical brutality which consists of use of verbal language. In the United States

cases of brutality has been part of the country since during the summer seasons of 2014 when a

young, unarmed, black male named Freddie Gray was shot and killed by a white officer. This

event sparked national outraged over police brutality against minorities and gave birth to the

“Black lives matter” movement (Embrick, 2015), and since majority of the people has now

access to internet, every wrong doings of the police organization can now easily uncover.

Public is slowly losing trust among the police because of amongst other things such as

brutality itself, criminal behavior and abuse of power (Burger, 2011).

Police torture has covered headlines for the last few years. This torture is exceeds the

standard range of punishment. Extra judicial killing are becoming common. The police officers

responsible for the torture are not held for long before they are released to their normal duties.

Studies have noted that police use excessive force to the general people rather than criminals.

The police use this force on suspects, rather than the ideal victims of the offense. A number of

people think that the excessive force is necessary to prevent additional crimes in the society.

Therefore, it is important to analyze the disparate views on the two sides of this aspect.

Since the issue of police brutality is based on racial grounds, the police should be held

accountable for their misconduct. This will enable them to treat all groups of individuals with

equality; hence use appropriate amount of force. According to social scientist, a lot of police

officers are not trusted by their communities as a result of misconduct. Their anger is imposed
beyond measures. Further investigations also affirm that the brutality of police officers is

persistent. Systems that deal with the abuses are no longer at ease. The complainants find

difficulty in seeking administrative aid. Majority of the police officers evade punishment after

violating the law. A study by the Seattle times depicted that 70% of all police crimes are

unreported, and therefore, no actions are taken.

Even though police brutality is noted to be a negative incidence by a vast majority, some

think that is it better way of ending crimes. The young and the old have improved their tactics in

handling guns. Violent crimes are committed by very young individuals. Tapes of gun shows are

viewed by a larger number of criminals. Maintaining law and order has been tough task for the

police officers. In this, what would a police officer do when they are robbed and their tools are

stolen? Getting the victim of the offense would provoke brutality. Therefore, the police should

exercise their forces in order to scare criminals.

Police brutality is among the terms, when mentioned, would draw the attention of

numerous people. Nobody would wish to experience the incident. However, the aspect should

continue in order to scare criminals and those intending to become criminals in the future.

In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Roa Duterte administration’s bloody “war on

drugs” worsened during the covid-19 lockdown, where in, the killing has spiked 50% between

April to July 2020. The number of fatalities in these ostensible drug enforcement raids, in which

the police routinely claimed that the victims fought back (Conde, 2020).

Ordinary citizens are also being oppressed by the police officers. As they gathered upon

receiving the news that relief items were to be distributed. When the distribution didn’t happen,

the residents decided to stay and stage a protest to demand a relief from the city government.
The resident’s alliance, however, told Amnesty International that police resorted to violently

dispersing the protestors and hit them with wooden sticks.

For solving cases easier and quicker police choose these ways. But it is not always

accurate. This is made due to poor investigation techniques and poor preservation of material

evidence. Fear or police harassment and further torture if the victim or family members

complain.

The history of the modern Philippines is also a history of political violence that comes in

many forms. The Philippines still harbors a revolutionary movement that challenges the state.

The long-standing ethno political armed conflict seems currently to be coming to an end after

half a century of intermittent fighting. Further, the Philippines stands out with respect to less

prominent forms of political violence in Southeast Asia. Despite being the oldest democracy in

the region, Philippine elections are regularly accompanied by the killing of officeholders,

candidates, and political supporters; not to mention that the Philippines are the regional front-

runner with respect to killed journalists, political activists, and human rights defenders. Finally,

one should also mention that the Philippines have by far the highest homicide rate in Southeast

Asia. Taken together, these observations signal that by regional standards the Philippines seem to

have a multidimensional problem of violence. Whereas the spatial and temporal patterns of most

of the above-mentioned forms of violence are well documented, police use of deadly force

against criminal suspects has escaped public and scholarly attention almost completely in the

past. Police Use of Deadly Force in the Philippines this has only changed recently, when Rodrigo

Duterte instigated a vast anti-drug-crime campaign as he took over as president of the Philippines

on 30 June 2016. Reports on campaign-like killings of criminal suspects focused almost

completely on the dirty work of death squads that were generally perceived to have been
instigated and led by local politicians and manned to a significant extent by moonlighting

policemen. This made the everyday violence perpetrated by the police under the label of “armed

encounter” largely invisible in the media. With the Philippine National Police (PNP) proudly

reporting success measured not only by the number of arrests, but also by the number of suspects

killed in “legitimate encounters”, police use of deadly force became a prominent subject of

public discourse. Yet, attention is mostly focused on the obvious, on the monstrous phenomenon

that catches the eye. Several questions are largely left unanswered: What was the magnitude of

police use of deadly force before Duterte? What did its spatial dispersal look like? How much

did violent police behavior increase under Duterte as compared to earlier police use of force? Do

we see much path-dependency, or do sub-national units react differently from what might be

expected on account of their past records of police violence? To what extent do magnitude as

well as spatial and temporal variations of violence relate to objective factors of threat and danger

to which policemen are exposed to different degrees in varying environments? And, how many

of the killings do not result from self-defense, but must be categorized as extra-judicial killings?

Some of these questions have been left unanswered for lack of empirical data, others for want of

a suitable approach. When answers are provided these are generally based on analyses of a small

number of cases. Whether these are representative of the general situation or rather exceptions is

as unclear as whether there is one general pattern of police use of deadly force and not an array

of different local patterns. This article intends to fill these gaps by providing a comprehensive

analysis of armed encounters between the PNP and (supposedly) armed suspects on the sub-

national level from 2006 until 2018. Spatial and temporal analyses allow for the creation of a

detailed map of such violence that uncovers patterns that are lost in works based on small

samples of rather prominent cases, as for example studies on earlier vigilantism in Davao under
Duterte, in Cebu City under mayor Tomas Osmeña, or in other cities and municipalities (Human

Rights Watch, 2009). These patterns also escape most analyses of current police violence under

Duterte that tend to miss the extraordinary spatial and temporal variation in the concrete patterns

police deadly use of force takes in the various provinces of the Philippines. The rest of the paper

is organized as follows. Section two summarizes literature on police violence in the Philippines.

Section three introduces the concepts and indicators that I use to analyze police violence. Section

four describes the datasets used in the analysis. Finally, in section five I investigate the temporal

and spatial patterns of pre Duterte and Duterte police violence as well as the role of the threat

and the lethality of PNP use of deadly force.

POLICE VIOLENCE IN THE PHILIPPINES: A SHORT OVERVIEW OF THE

LITERATURE

Even though police use of deadly force is a regularly reported by Philippine media, it has

been largely ignored by social scientific research. In general, it has been subsumed ASEAS 12(2)

| 151 Peter Kreuzer under the broader heading of extralegal, summary, and arbitrary executions

by human rights groups, as for example by the Free Legal Assistance Group (2007) and the

special report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary

executions, Philip Alston (2008a, 2008b, 2009), which, however, gave prominence to violence

exerted against journalists, human rights defenders, and social activists (see also, Parreño, 2011).

Studies that focused on violence against suspected criminals focused exclusively on the

phenomenon of death squad killings (Breuil & Rozema, 2009; Human Rights Watch, 2009;

Picardal, 2016). Karapatan, a left-wing NGO that provides the most comprehensive account of

state-perpetrated violence likewise does not cover fatal violence against criminal suspects in its
statistics1 . One of the first studies to explicitly take note of this specific form of violence was a

study on the role of violence in upholding domination by political families in Pampanga

(Kreuzer, 2012) that established a typology of “top-down violence” that included police shoot-

outs as a distinct category (Kreuzer, 2012, pp. 24-26). Even prominent “armed encounters” as the

one in Atimonan (Quezon province) in 2013, in which 13 suspected members of a drug syndicate

were summarily killed by combined forces of the PNP and the Armed Forces of the Philippines

(AFP) at a checkpoint, did not elicit serious scientific interest, even though in this case a forensic

report by the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation concluded: “The apparent objective of

the operation was to kill all the victims” (National Bureau of Investigation, 2013, p. 49). It is no

exaggeration to argue that scholarly research on police killings in the Philippines started with the

Duterte campaign in 2016. In late 2016, Reyes (2016) and Curato (2016) offered two analyses

that both focus on the phenomenological side of the current campaign. Both address the seeming

paradox that a policy that victimizes thousands of people apparently has enduring public support.

Whereas Curato (2016) links this to penal populism, Reyes (2016) conceives of police killings as

spectacles of violence conveying the message that certain people do not belong to the people and

can (or should) be killed in order to “enhance personal safety, public safety and law and order,

which is very appealing to ordinary people who experienced insecurity in their daily lives”

(Reyes, 2016, p. 118). Sheila Coronel (2017) sets out from a different vantage point that focuses

closely on the economic logic underlying police perpetrated killings of suspects. She argues that,

under Duterte, police-officers are rewarded with money and promotions if they meet the

president’s demands; theft of victims’ belongings during police operations is tolerated as is

extortion from drug suspects. She concludes that to many police officers, the drug-war has

become a thriving business. Linking the present to reports of past police involvement in crime,
she also argues that police officers directly profit from the new opportunities to neutralize

opponents in various spheres of illegal business. According to her, “Duterte’s drug war was

waged by a police force accustomed to extortion and execution”, a force that embraced the

opportunity provided by Duterte’s policy “as entrepreneurs looking for maximum gain”

(Coronel, 2017, p. 189). Her argument is given a further twist by Jensen and Hapal (2018). They

provide an analysis of past and present police practice in the largest barangay2 of the Philippines,

located in Quezon City, which harbors a large community of urban poor. They argue that violent

police coercion should be interpreted as a specific activity in exchange relationships that link the

police to the (poor) local communities. In the past, selective extralegal killings provided the iron

fist behind a normally smoothly working system that allowed police officers to extort money

from suspects in exchange for release. Duterte’s war on drugs “reconfigured the parameters of

these relationships” to the advantage of the police, as “the price of survival seems to have gone

up significantly” (Jensen & Hapal, 2018, pp. 57-58). While these studies are insightful with

respect to certain dynamics driving police violence, it is still largely unclear in how far the

observed patterns are representative for the Philippines. Further, the extent as well as the

temporal and spatial variation of pre-Duterte police use of deadly force is not dealt with. In June

2018, David, Mendoza, Atun, Cossid, and Soriano (2018) published the first quantitative

analysis of the lethal violence associated with the anti-drug campaign from May 2016 to

September 2017. Their core results closely tally the analysis below. My analysis goes further in

two respects: It extends to July 2018 and includes the provincial level, whereas David et al.’s

(2018) analysis focuses on the regional level only. They conclude that lethal police (and

vigilante) violence is distributed highly unevenly with most killings happening in the National

Capital Region (NCR) 3 and the directly adjacent regions 3 and 4a (see, Figure 1). Like the
ABS-CBN News (n.d.) dataset employed in this study (see below), David et al. (2018) only list

the numbers of suspects killed but neither the number of the suspects wounded nor the police

officers killed or wounded. Their dataset further does not allow to draw any conclusions about

continuity and change from pre-Duterte to Duterte-period police use of deadly force.

CONCLUSION

Law enforcement agents are part of an institutional culture and therefore abide and act

accordingly to what is permissible administratively within the confines of their employment

institutions. This suggests that excessive force and police brutality continues to exist because it is

tolerated by officials who are in command of the officers. While the focus has long been on

police officers, perhaps what is needed is a closer examination of the administrative figures that

set the tone of the work environment and enforces work rules. Perhaps the reasons why police

brutality continues may be linked to law enforcement officers adhering to and abiding by

unspoken rules that reward or punish employees based upon his acceptance or rejection of police

culture. More research is needed on the administrative structure, culture, and work rules within

the work place of law enforcement officials.

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excessive force. Journal of Law & Criminology, 85, (2), 481-503.

Burger, J. 2011, To Protect and Serve: restoring Public Confidence in the SAPS. SA Crime
Quarterly, 36: 13-22

Lockett, T, N. (2013). Effects of racism and discrimination on personality development among

African American male repeat offenders. Retrieved from:

http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/1098/

Jim Crow Museum: Origins of Jim Crow- Ferris State University.

www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm.