The headline reads “Police rack up an almost perfectly deadly record in Philippine drug war”. The Reuters article written by Clare Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Damir Sagolj claims that when “the police open fire in the Duterte drugs war, the suspects almost always die”. The writers say that they based this conclusion from their own investigation and that of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights.
The article paints a dire picture of the Duterte drug war, supporting the assertions of the Liberal Party led opposition that the Duterte drug war is a state sponsored instrument of mass murder. It serves to give legitimacy to the allegations of people like Leila Delimaw and Antonio Trollianes (Pun intended). It serves to raise “red flags” for the international community hoping to muster support for Duterte’s ouster. They even compared the statistics they gathered about the Philippine to that of Brazil and concluded that the Duterte drug war is much bloodier than others. The article is damning and could make one seriously question the sincerity and effectiveness of the Philippine National Police and the Duterte administration’s war on drugs. It even made me worry because a “kill ratio of 97{560c5a826b9d0f79d9056f2e452d35fface599afff45834a592fa1a3f7fd1a74}” is scary as hell. So I looked into it deeper and found out that the Reuter’s article is nothing but tabloid scum. Here is what I found.
The data is suspect.
Here are some excerpts from the Reuters article showing the conclusions they made from the “data”:
The 97 percent kill ratio, eyewitness testimony and other evidence amassed by Reuters suggest officers are summarily gunning down suspects in President Duterte’s crackdown.
The kill ratio is much higher than in countries with comparable drug-related violence.
The Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, where police have been accused of extrajudicial killings in a bloody crime crackdown, pales next to the Philippines under Duterte. For every five people the Rio police killed between 2013 and 2015, they injured one person, according to a Human Rights Watch report in July.
In the Philippine cases examined by Reuters and CHR, the police killed 97 percent of those they shot – 33 dead for every person wounded.
What Reuters did here is asserted that the statistics that they gathered is representative of what is actually happening in the Philippines as a whole. So the big questions a critical thinking mind should ask is how they came up with these statistics? What was their sample? How big was their sample size? How was the sample selected? Answering these questions is necessary to ascertain the validity of any statistical inference one make from the data.
Reuters said their investigative reporting is based on 42 cases they reviewed plus 9 cases investigated by the Philippine Commission on Human rights all in the Manila region. In the 51 cases they investigated, police officers killed 100 and wounded 3. This is where they got their statistics that the police kill 97{560c5a826b9d0f79d9056f2e452d35fface599afff45834a592fa1a3f7fd1a74} of those they shot. Why is this conclusion problematic? The sample size is too small for it to have any relevance as a reflection of national average. The sample size was selected from one location only and therefore is not representative of what is happening in the entire Philippines. Reuters and the authors conveniently glossed over this important detail. Their blatant disregard for logic and basic statistical inference is disgusting. The fact that Reuters did not even present the actual national data which is readily available further proves their intent to mislead the public and cater to special interest that they are protecting. So what is the national data on Duterte’s war on drugs?
According to PNP data from Jul 1, 2016 to October 26, 2016 the government has conducted 32,909 anti-drug operations nationwide. These operations resulted in 31,629 arrests and 1,725 drug suspects killed. So let us do some basic math and come up with the actual “kill ratio” of the Duterte drug war. There were 1,725 deaths vs 31,629 arrests. This means that for every 100 people arrested there were only 5 people killed. This is not even close to the “97{560c5a826b9d0f79d9056f2e452d35fface599afff45834a592fa1a3f7fd1a74} kill ratio” that Reuters claims to have uncovered. Why did Reuters not bother to look at the actual national statistics? Why did they not even mention this in their “investigative report”? Because it does not cater to the special interest they are protecting.
Rappler also recently published an article showing some data on Duterte War on drugs painting the same picture as Reuters – the war on drugs is deadly. The Rappler article states that there are now 6,095 people killed in President Duterte’s war on drugs. They even compared this death toll to the 911 death toll, martial law death toll and the Thailand Drug war death toll:
This irresponsible manipulation of data and false comparison has only one clear intention. To sow fear and misinform the public. Let me enumerate the ways Rappler again lied in this article.
1. Notice how Rappler used the number 6,095 people killed to compare it to the other numbers 3240, 2977, and 2500. The 6,095 people killed is a combination of police involved shootings and victims of extra judicial or vigilante-style killings. The picture they try to pain is that the Duterte administration is a mass murderer who has killed 6,095 people in 6 months which is more than those killed in the Martial Law years and in the 9/11 terrorist attack. The reality is only 2,120 involved a police officer. The rest can be described as murder / homicide that had nothing to do with the police. Their comparison should have been 2,120 against 3240, 2977 and 2500. Of course they did not go this route – the prudent and truthful route – because it does not support the narrative of lies they are peddling.
2. Is the Duterte war on drugs really that deadly? Remember that the number you always hear from the media – 6,095 killed – is not the number of people killed during police operation. They make it sound that way by obfuscating this important fact because the media does not want the public to know the truth. A big part of the deaths they attribute to the Duterte drug war are plain and simply murder / homicide. If we use the official meaning of extra-judicial killing, these murder / homicides will not qualify as EJK however the media and the Liberal party brainwashed opposition insists on labeling them as EJK. If we are to use the same definition the opposition uses today for EJK to the crime numbers since 2011-2015, we see a clear picture of ineptitude and neglect. Below is a table showing the number of Murders and Homicides during 2011-2015 when the Liberal Party government of President Abnoy Aquino and DILG Mar Ahas was in power.
The numbers don’t lie, but the media does! Using Rappler’s own logic and data analytical skills, the Aquino administration should be proclaimed as the biggest mass murderer of all. But we do never heard any outrage from Rappler and the establishment media about these numbers before.
3. Rappler and most of the establishment media claim to be serving the public interest by providing quality and balanced journalism. The fact that they are willing to warp the definition of extra-judicial killings to fit a narrative they want to sell to the public about the current state of affairs gives us a hint on whose interest they really serve. From 2011-2015, thousands of innocent people were being murdered. The PNP statistics show the Liberal party not only failed to reduce murder/ homicide but actually made it worse. Rappler and the establishment media did not brand the Aquino administration as mass murderer because it was considered the status quo. It was status quo that innocent people were being murdered. It was status quo that the government was inept. Now that the Duterte administration is aggressively going after drug syndicates, Rappler and the establishment media are up in arms. They are even willing to distort the truth, redefine established definitions of EJK, just to fit the propaganda they want to sell. This attitude makes me wonder whose interest are they protecting? If they really are about serving the public interest then why was there no uproar when most of those killed were innocent civilians? Why so angry now that 2,102 drug suspects have died and Php 8.3 Billion worth of drugs have been confiscated?
Recently the establishment media has been very adversarially to the Duterte administration. I understand that an effective media should be adversarial to the government in power but the adversarial nature of the press today is misplaced. The press should be adversarial in a sense that it seeks to speak truth to power to advance the interest of the public. When the Liberal party was in power and they touted the achievements of Oplan Lambat Sibat, the press never raised “red-flags” about the thousands of innocent civilian lives lost from murder/ homicide. They never spoke truth to power even when the data showed the administration was not telling the truth.
The adversarial nature of the media today is not in line with the public interest. The way they distort the facts to support a narrative they have set in their board-rooms show that they are not interested in the public interest. The public support for Duterte and his campaign against drugs and criminality is strong and is well documented – the public has spoken since the election yet the media tries to drown their voices. The media insists on selling a message to the public. A message not grounded on truth or public support. There is another word for this – propaganda. Yes, the media today is nothing but a propaganda machine. It is no longer a mediator of truth and public discourse. The big question we should all be asking now is – whose interest is the media serving? To answer this question, you just have to look at who they are proclaiming as victims in their narrative.
The adversarial nature of the media today is not in line with the public interest. The way they distort the facts to support a narrative they have set in their board-rooms show that they are not interested in the public interest. The public support for Duterte and his campaign against drugs and criminality is strong and is well documented – the public has spoken since the election yet the media tries to drown their voices. The media insists on selling a message to the public. A message not grounded on truth or public support. There is another word for this – propaganda. Yes, the media today is nothing but a propaganda machine. It is no longer a mediator of truth and public discourse. The big question we should all be asking now is – whose interest is the media serving? To answer this question, you just have to look at who they are proclaiming as victims in their narrative.
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