‘If I Had a Hammer…’

Someone with only a hammer for a tool may be tempted to treat every problem as a nail. His election as president provides PRRD with many hammers. But the presidency offers many more instruments beyond the hammer to address the complex task of nation-building.

Because it seems to have worked in Davao, the hammer strategy of “shoot to kill” remains PRRD’s favored device for dealing with the drug menace. But other cities have reportedly managed to control criminality while observing constitutional rights to due process.  The summary killing of suspects by government forces arguably undermines the rule of law and contributes to a climate conducive to vigilante murders.

No one questions the need to dismantle the drug trade and demolish the network of narco-criminals among politicians, bureaucrats, judges and security forces who have profited from promoting its expansion. The public’s growing uneasiness about the means employed to achieve the laudable ends of the war on drugs is not without basis. No country has eradicated the drug problem simply through the ruthless application of violence.

In a poor country, the drug trade partly stems from the problem of poverty. The poor apparently resort to low-dose, low-cost “shabu” sachets to dull hunger pangs and boost energy for physical labor. Their need creates a shadow economy yielding princely profits to those who organize and finance the trade, while luring the poor into serving as drug pushers.

As in other countries, the “shock and awe” impact of the hammer strategy initially produced encouraging results. But even the death of drug lords barely shakes the business. Two months after the killing of Jeffrey “Jaguar” Diaz by Las Piñas police, according to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency in the Central Visayas, his drug syndicate was back supplying consumers in the Cebu city jail. Violence directed at replaceable, penny-ante addicts at the street level is even less likely to threaten the trade.

Frustration with the weaknesses of the justice system has muted resistance to the hammer strategy, justified as required by the epidemic spread of the addiction to dangerous drugs. Are those who reject the shoot-to-kill strategy underestimating the scale and the gravity of the drug threat?

Since 1986, Social Weather Stations (SWS) has included in its regular surveys perceptions of public safety as a critical quality-of-life measure. Monitored quarterly since 1992, one module inquires into the respondents’ actual experience of crime (burglary of the home and robbery outside the home; theft of motor vehicle; physical violence).  A second looks at anxiety about the safety of the home and the neighborhood.

In 2005, SWS added a third module, asking whether respondents believed there were already “too many people addicted to banned drugs” in their neighborhood. This first survey elicited a 37-percent agreement with the statement. Agreement rose to the 40s in 2006-08, dropped back to the 30s in 2009, before climbing back to the 40s in 2012 and recently exceeding 60 percent.

The upward trend is cause for concern, though the drug war itself might have contributed to the perception of rising drug addiction prevalence. But it should also be assessed in the context of the movement in the other two public safety modules.

The government has not achieved much success in alleviating people’s apprehensions about home and neighborhood security. Over the last three decades, some 50 percent and, more recently, over 60 percent of the respondents reported that they feared to walk around the neighborhood at night and were concerned about criminals breaking into their homes.

On the actual experience of crime, however, the numbers have been running in the opposite direction. During the Cory Aquino administration, 23 to 38 percent of families reported that they were crime victims. The numbers progressively improved until they reached the lowest figure of 6 percent in mid-2015, but crept back during the period of the presidential electoral campaign to 11 percent.

The trend lines on the three modules of public safety do not appear to move in synchronized, lock-step fashion. Despite lower public concern about the drug problem, the feeling of insecurity stayed at high levels. While the number actually victimized by crime has been going down, anxiety about security and the incidence of addiction prevailed.

These numbers need validation and assessment before we can accept the contention that the country confronts a “crisis.” This narrative of a society in crisis that needed an iron hand at the helm worked effectively during the electoral campaign. The same script now seeks to strengthen the hammer strategy by a 300-percent increase in the confidential and intelligence budget from P500 million to P2 billion.

The financial and human costs of the strategy call for subjecting the script to a thorough review and analysis.

Edilberto C. de Jesus (edcdejesus@gmail.com) is professor emeritus at the Asian Institute of Management. Prof. Rofel Brion’s Tagalog translation of this column and others earlier published, together with other commentaries, are in https://secondthoughts.ph.