(Eagle News) — Senator Leila de Lima on Friday, June 29, accused the Philippine National Police of manipulating the number of those killed in the drug war.
De Lima cited as alleged proof the PNP’s 2017 accomplishment report to President Rodrigo Duterte in which it allegedly pegged the number of dead at 20,322, “combining the number of those killed in police operations and so-called ‘deaths under investigation,’ the PNP’s euphemism for vigilante killings committed by urban death squads.”
“The PNP actually cites these numbers as accomplishments in the drug war that they boast to Duterte, thereby admitting that the work of the vigilantes is an integral part of the drug war,” she said.
Since then, though, when the PNP “realiz(ed) the stupidity of citing death squad killings as accomplishments in the drug war,” she said the PNP “stuck with the lower number of those killed in police operations.”
“When the government itself manipulates the numbers, it is difficult to arrive at a definitive accounting of the dead,” she said.