Somehow, we don’t believe that the Duterte administration will drop the police from its war on illegal drugs despite the pronouncement of PNP Director General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa.
In fact, we suspect that the police will assume a below-the-radar role in the antidrug operations even if the PNP leadership won’t admit it. Dela Rosa said himself that the withdrawal of the police in the antidrug operations will be temporary, i.e., only a couple of weeks or so.
Don’t take our word for it since the human rights advocates have issued a similar warning on Dela Rosa’s pronouncement. Long before the murder of South Korean businessman Jee Ick-Joo by police officers near Dela Rosa’s office, there were lots of unresolved extrajudicial killings (EJK) of drug suspects.
Even if there is no physical evidence proving it, the public have long suspected that plainclothes policemen carried out the executions, hiding their identities under ski masks and helmets.
The public also refuses to believe that the police blame these killings on hit men hired by drug syndicates wanting to quash rivals as well as feeling the heat from the government’s all-out war on drugs.
The Korean businessman’s death, however, has stained the PNP’s image like few other incidents since it came at a time when the police and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) have been scoring big in the war, with the latest being a P120-million drug haul here in Cebu City.
The police’s temporary withdrawal from the war on drugs also comes at a time when the PDEA received reports of drug syndicates developing “yellow shabu” that they can manufacture themselves without sourcing their drugs from someplace else like Manila.
That report alone refutes the perception that the drug supply had been drying up, though it can be agreed that access to drugs had been constricted significantly due to the high price point for these illegal substances.
This new development means that the PDEA, which President Rodrigo Duterte earlier threatened to have dismantled due to its supposed failures to reduce the drug problem, is now taking the lead in dealing with the menace.
That’s quite fine for the Commission on Human Rights which earlier expressed alarm over the rise in the incidence of EJKs in the country. With Dela Rosa saying that the PNP hierarchy will engage in top-to-bottom cleansing of its internal ranks, does this mean the CHR will also take part in this?
Again, we doubt if the cleansing will be so thorough as to remove the real scalawags in uniform let alone the possibility that the CHR will actually take part in the cleansing by presenting their cases to the PNP hierarchy.
This withdrawal is but a mere timeout as the coach and his assistants rework their strategy in the war on drugs to avoid these brazen murders in the future. At least we hope there would be a better recalibration of the war to avoid more casualties.