By Gian Angnged

On the eve of May 31, Police Master Sergeant Hensie Zinampan shot and killed 52-year-old Lilybeth Valdez in Fairview, Quezon City. In a viral video taken by Valdez’s grandson, Zinampan was seen confronting Valdez and pulling her by the hair before shooting her point-blank in cold blood. He has since been charged with a murder complaint and an administrative case for grave misconduct.

Despite piling reports of police killings and abuse over the COVID-19 pandemic, Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque insisted that Valdez’s murder was “the exception to the rule”. 

“We cannot do anything. Every organization has a bad egg. But please, we have hundreds of thousands in our ranks of policemen and we hear one or two cases of this nature,” Roque added.

Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Guillermo Eleazar also claimed that good policemen still outnumber the “few rogues” in the police force. “We are serious in pushing for reforms within the police organization. I am exhausting all efforts to get rid of these few police scalawags who put the PNP in a bad light,” Eleazar said. 

But can any amount of reform save an institution that has long been rotten to the core? 

Bloody history of oppression

The PNP’s history of oppression can be traced back to its predecessor, the Philippine Constabulary (PC), which was formed by the US colonial government in 1901 to quell the 

Filipino revolutionary movement. 

After the Japanese Occupation, the PC launched a counterinsurgency campaign against the Hukbalahap, a communist-led army that toppled Japanese forces and resisted the return to US colonial rule.

The Philippine Constabulary, along with the localized Integrated National Police (INP), also played a key role in stifling dissent and perpetrating grave human rights abuses during the fascist Marcos dictatorship. However, the PC’s and the INP’s involvement in Marcos’ ouster allowed them to escape accountability from their atrocities.

In 1991, the PC and the INP merged to form the PNP, but little has changed in its role and practices. The PNP has remained a top human rights violator — targeting oppressed sectors and anyone who dares to dissent against the ruling power under the guise of crime prevention and counterterrorism.

Enabled by culture of impunity

“Cases of police brutality in the Philippines are not isolated: they are bred by decades of impunity—especially under this fascist regime,” said Philip Jamilla of rights group Karapatan in a tweet.

Indeed, the Duterte administration has shielded the police from accountability for their grisly crimes several times, effectively emboldening them to do—or kill—as they please.

President Duterte has repeatedly vowed to protect policemen who have killed drug suspects from being imprisoned, even stating that he was “ready to go to jail for them” and would coach them on what they should say to evade prosecution and conviction. 

On the same day as Valdez’s murder, Duterte also told human rights groups that the government cannot give all the records of drug war operations due to “national security issues.” His remarks came after PNP Gen. Eleazar announced that the PNP would allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate 61 drug war cases. 

Abuse of authority in war on drugs

In November 2020, the PNP reported that nearly 8,000 alleged drug suspects had been killed in police anti-drug operations since the war on drugs began under the Duterte administration. However, human rights groups say the death toll may be closer to 30,000.

The PNP does not criminally investigate deaths from police operations because they are covered by the “presumption of regularity”, meaning police who kill suspects should not be questioned as it is presumed that the killings are done in the line of duty. This presumption has already been disproved by the court conviction of the 3 officers who gunned down 17-year-old Kian Delos Santos during a Caloocan City drug raid in 2017. Rights group Amnesty International has also disputed the principle, saying that the PNP’s own manual requires that every police killing be investigated.

Additionally, a report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN OHCHR) found that the PNP plants guns as evidence to support their rehashed “nanlaban” narrative against the suspects they killed in anti-drug operations. 

Duterte’s own justice secretary Menardo Guevarra has admitted before the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that police failed to follow protocols in most anti-drug operations where suspects were killed. Guevarra added that weapons allegedly recovered from “drug suspects” killed in operations were not examined.

Bloodbath continues amid pandemic

In the face of the pandemic, the war on drugs in the Philippines has not ceased—it has even intensified. 

Deaths linked to PNP anti-drug operations have spiked drastically, with the Human Rights Watch (HRW) reporting that the police killed 50 percent more persons between April to July 2020 than they did in December 2019 to March 2020.

To quote Judge Rodolfo Azucena Jr., who convicted the cops who murdered Kian Delos Santos, “Never has homicide or murder been a function of law enforcement. The public peace is never predicated on the cost of human life.”

Reports of non-drug war police killings are also mounting, further perpetuating the bloodbath:

Days before Hensie Zinampan’s murder of Lilibeth Valdez was Edwin Arnigo’s death at the hands of Valenzuela City police. Arnigo was an 18-year-old diagnosed with intellectual disability as a comorbidity to his autism spectrum disorder; he was shot dead on May 24 in a raid of an illegal cockfighting game. 

In 2020, police shot dead former soldier Winston Ragos and mother and son Sonia and Frank Gregorio in separate incidents. Video footage of the killings showed that Ragos and the Gregorios were murdered in cold blood.

On March 7, 2021, state forces killed nine activists in Southern Tagalog:  a labor leader, a fisherfolk couple, four housing rights activists, and two indigenous rights activists. 

In Capiz and Iloilo, operatives of the PNP kidnapped, tortured, and killed nine members of the Tumandok indigenous people in the early hours of December 30, 2020. The list goes on and on. 

Defund the police

The PNP has proven many times over that it does not “serve and protect” the Filipino people. It does, however, unleash campaigns of terror as the bloodthirsty puppet of the Duterte regime. 

Under the Bayanihan 3 bill recently passed in Congress, the police, along with the military, is set to receive a PhP 54.6 billion budget increase for the pension funds of retired personnel—the second biggest allocation in the pandemic relief package bill. For 2021, a bloated budget amounting to PhP 190.520 billion was allocated to the PNP. Without its grotesque funds, the PNP will not only stop draining resources from much-needed projects, like economic aid for the poor—it will also be insulated from accountability no more. 

Mere reforms will not fix a rotten institution built on state violence and repression. Police brutality in the Philippines will only come to an end when the PNP has been defunded and eventually abolished, and when the president—its primary enabler—has been ousted. But this will only be achieved through collective action. It is up to us to fight back.