QCPD fails to account for 55 drug deaths

Officials at the Quezon City Police District (QCPD) are at loggerheads over the “downsized” official death toll in the government’s war on illegal drugs.

There were at least 55 deaths filed under 50 cases that were deliberately kept under wraps and unaccounted for in the official tally being released by the QCPD to the public since April.

The inaccurate figures came after it was found that the number of cases that had undetermined motives were purposely omitted from the official death toll of the drug war.

Chief Superintendent Guillermo Eleazar, QCPD director, said this was an internal mix- up that started in April and led to the inaccurate figures but they are already rectifying the situation.

He cited the number of “homicide cases under investigation” in the city from July 1, 2016 only increased to 335 fatalities on June 20 from the 323 deaths already reported by the police in March.

Based on these two figures released by the QCPD, there were only 12 deaths recorded from April to July 20 even though there were at least 11 killed in the past week alone.

The more accurate death toll in the city has already reached 390 fatalities in 350 cases, a revised tally from the QCPD showed.

Senior Superintendent Bartolome Bustamante said this set-up “should not have happened” as the QCPD only has one official tally for both internal purposes and public use.

Bustamante said that he is going to verify the matter as “55 deaths are too much to not be reported.”

He assured that “somebody has to be held accountable and liable” for the mix-up, which has put the integrity of police data into question.

Chief Inspector Florian Reynado, former chief of the QCPD Investigation and Detection Management Division which collates the police data, defended the move, saying that they purposely did not include the number of cases with undetermined motives because it “did not fall under the war on drugs.”

This is despite the fact that these cases, already characterized as “plain” homicide cases by Reynado, could still be recategorized as drug-related in the future and that the police have been releasing figures on non-drug-related cases since the start of the Duterte administration.

Eleazar said it was not their intention to hide or manipulate the figures, although he admitted that he himself was unaware that the official count was inaccurate and the accounting procedure was changed.

He claimed that the change in data collection could have been for the expeditious resolution of the cases, and not to mislead the public.

The QCPD chief said the inaccuracies were only “internal” in nature and should not have any bearing on the official figures being released by the organization of the Philippine National Police (PNP) as a whole.

However, guidelines on data reporting are directly issued by the higher headquarters of the police.

The change in the QCPD’s data collection procedure also came directly after more than a hundred deaths were reclassified as non-drug-related in March.

A total of 138 deaths were reclassified from initial status of suspected drug-related cases in less than a month despite initial indications that many of the deaths had involved illegal drugs.