Manila: A senior senator said police claims that there have been no extrajudicial killings under the present administration is mere “propaganda” as he called on authorities not to take people for fools.
Senator Franklin Drilon, minority floor leader, said the Philippine National Police (PNP) and other propagandists “would keep away from spreading misinformation and lies in the hope that people would eventually accept them as facts”.
He likened the PNP to the notorious Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
“Joseph Goebbels is Nazi Germany’s chief propagandist, who was once quoted as having said that, ‘if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it’,”
No official case
Chief Superintendent Dionardo Carlos, PNP spokesman, last week had said that contrary to public perception, there had been “no official case of extrajudicial killing under the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte”.
“The PNP protects every individual’s right to life. To allay or remove their fear, let it be known that under the present administration, there is only one case of extrajudicial killing or EJK for the period July 1, 2016, to September 30, 2017,” PNP said.
The PNP noted that the possibility of falling victim to an extrajudicial killing is “very remote, if we based it on facts and not on impression or perception”.
But Drilon said the PNP is taking people for a ride.
He said that the PNP and other propagandists “would keep spreading misinformation and lies in the hope that people would eventually accept them as facts”.
Drilon took note of the killings of two minors, Kian delos Santos and Carl Arnaiz last month, in the hands of policemen.
The two were said by police to have been killed when they tried to fight off arresting officers, but testimonies from witnesses indicated otherwise.
The questionable circumstances surrounding Delos Santos and Arnaiz’s deaths were viewed against the backdrop that there had been some 3,800 deaths linked to the Duterte administration’s anti-drug campaign.
Duterte likewise took the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) to task for its inability to provide reliable data on the government’s anti-drugs campaign.
'Conflicting statistics'
“The law provides that the data produced by the PSA shall be the official and controlling statistics of the government,” Drilon said.
Drilon raised the issue amid the confusion concerning conflicting statistics related to the anti-drug campaign. “To me, that is very discomforting; if we are just relying on the data of the police who may have other motives or agenda in dishing out statistics,” he said.
“I cannot understand why a major policy thrust of this administration, which is solving of the drug problem, is not supported by reliable data from the PSA,” Drilon added.
Last May, Duterte sacked Dangerous Drugs Board chairman Benjamin Reyes for saying that there are only 1.8 million drug dependents in the country — way below the 4.7 million figure cited by the President and Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).
“If we are saying that we just rely on the police whose motive insofar as the data is concerned is suspect, then we really have a problem, Reliable data should be the basis of policy," Drilon, a former labour minister, said.
"We should shift to data-driven policy-making, especially in this war against drugs, instead of generating suspect data for the sole purpose of backing up policies already made,” Drilon said.
