ASIA Duterte’s crackdown on petty crime draws ire
Public drinking and loitering targeted
MANILA: When six plainclothes policemen, hands gripping their holstered guns, charged down the winding alleys of the slum where Edwin Panis lives, he didn’t imagine they could be coming for him.
Mr Panis, 45, was drinking beer with friends near his shack on an embankment overlooking Manila Bay. A stevedore and neighbourhood security officer, he hardly fit the profile of the drug addicts and dealers who have been targeted by the police since President Rodrigo Duterte took office — a bloody crackdown that Mr Panis, like many Filipinos, supported.
But in moments, he and his three friends were under arrest, hands cuffed behind them. Their offence: drinking beer in public.
“The war on drugs has become a war on drunks,” Mr Panis said bitterly, days after his release from an overcrowded cell.
Two years into Mr Duterte’s term, after thousands of killings by police officers and vigilantes in his crackdown on narcotics, the government’s campaign against crime has taken a new turn.
Last month, he authorised the national police to start arresting people for infractions like drinking in the streets, public urination or even being outdoors without a shirt — violations that were previously dealt with by neighbourhood security officers like Panis.
Since then, more than 50,000 people have been rounded up for such minor offences.
There has not been bloodshed of the kind seen in Mr Duterte’s crackdown on drugs, though at least one detainee has died in police custody. Still, in Manila’s slums, where most of the drug war killings have taken place, many now fear that the smallest infraction might cost them their lives.
“There’s no way not to be scared,” said Amy Jane Pablo, 37, who lives near Mr Panis in the Tondo slum and witnessed his arrest.
In a speech in early June, after the highprofile killings of a pregnant lawyer in the Manila area and a priest who was shot dead in a small-town church, Mr Duterte said there were “simply too many crimes” and promised “radical changes in the days to come”. Days later, he said that people idling in the streets were “potential trouble for the public”.
The crackdown began immediately afterward. Within a week, the national police had arrested 7,000 people — Mr Panis among them — for loitering, public drinking and other alleged violations of neighbourhood ordinances.
The new policy has similarities to the “broken windows” approach to policing adopted a generation ago by some US cities, which held that cracking down visibly on minor infractions would lead to a drop in major crimes. Inspector Adonis Sugui, chief investigator at the Tondo police station, defended the campaign, saying that “most of our crimes start with drinking in public places”.
“They have a drink, they hold people up, shoot each other, cause mischief,” Mr Sugui said. “Mr Duterte is right. Once they start drinking, their mind is altered.”
Carlos Conde, a researcher for Human Rights Watch in Manila, said the campaign amounted to “expanding the drug war to other crimes, using the same methods — just brute police force”.
“They’re saying we committed crimes, even if we didn’t,” Mr Panis’ neighbour, said on her doorstep, just across a narrow alley from where the arrest happened. “They’re just plucking people off the street.”
After his arrest, Mr Panis was put into an outdoor cell so crowded that he spent the night on his feet, leaning against a few dozen other men who had been detained. The next day, they were bused to City Hall for a hearing and then released, told to wait for a subpoena to appear in court.
“If they don’t like what you’re doing, they arrest you,” Mr Panis said.
Some have compared the crackdown to martial law — a sensitive subject in the Philippines, where the years of military rule under dictator Ferdinand Marcos are still remembered. Mr Duterte, an admirer of Marcos, imposed martial law in the southern Philippines after an Islamic uprising last year.
Mr Duterte’s new crackdown is not martial law, which would involve the suspension of normal law and the imposition of military rule. Still, Jose Manuel Diokno, dean of the De La Salle University College of Law in Manila, said the comparison was “very apt”.
He said martial law under Marcos, which lasted from 1972 to 1981, began with the enforcement of “ridiculous rules”.