Friday, September 29, 2017

Filipino police seek drug informants via ‘drop boxes’

Want to get rid of your mother-in-law, or a creditor, or just an unpleasant neighbor you don’t like in the Philippines? The Philippine National Police have established public “drop boxes” for informants to anonymously submit the names of alleged drug dealers and users in President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous drug war, which is thought to have killed more than 10,000 people so far, most of them poor and powerless.

According to the Washington, DC-based NGO Human Rights Watch, the neighborhood informant system was first reported in July in Quezon City, a part of Metro Manila, and has since spread to at least two cities and several towns in two provinces. The police chief of Quezon City said when he launched the system that he would put one drop box in each of the city’s 142 barangays or neighborhoods.

It was a variant of this kind of informant system that police used in Thailand in 2003, when then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra implemented his own drug war. During the next three months, some 2,800 purported drug dealers or users were killed and thousands of others were forced into coercive “treatment” for drug addiction. An official investigation later discovered that more than half of those who had been gunned down had no connection whatsoever to drug dealers. They were people that police or informants wanted dead because of grudges or unfounded suspicions. Full story...

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