MANILA, Philippines — Illegal drugs remain a problem in the country, but their influence on communities has been diminished after five years of President Duterte’s war on illegal drugs, the Philippine National Police (PNP) said yesterday.
Citing latest government data, the PNP said Duterte’s crackdown on illegal drugs since July 2016 has resulted in the death of 6,117 drug suspects in alleged shootouts with lawmen and the arrest of 289,622 others.
Delivering his assessment of the war on drugs in a video message, PNP chief Gen. Guillermo Eleazar admitted that some parts of the country are still saddled with the problem.
“There’s no denying that after five years, there’s still a problem with illegal drugs in certain corners of the community,” Eleazar said in Filipino.
But he said the situation under Duterte’s term has improved, with streets a lot safer now than before. “It also cannot be denied that there’s been a big difference in the situation compared with pre-2016,” he said.
The PNP released the video as part of its report to the nation a month ahead of Duterte’s sixth and final State of the Nation Address (SONA).
During a forum with the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, Eleazar said there has been a 60-percent reduction in index crimes in the past five years.
The result, Eleazar, is that people can go out of their homes without fear of ending up as victims of crime.
In his speech at the 14th anniversary of the Human Rights Affairs Office, Eleazar exhorted all men and women in the PNP to help by ostracizing dirty cops. – Eva Visperas, Cesar Ramirez, Pia Lee-Brago