It's Been 9 Years Since Allegedly Bad Officer Was Suspended For a lucky nine years, Toronto Police Const. Ioan-Florin Floria has been sitting at home and drawing his salary while suspended from duty on allegations he used his position to assist his friends in an Eastern European drug cartel. Almost a decade has passed since the former traffic cop was swept up in a shocking drug bust that saw the alleged kingpins of a Romanian gang under arrest for an international operation that swapped marijuana for cocaine. [continues 630 words]
"Rise, above principle and do what's right." - Walter Heller AS the famous Roman orator Cicero had written, "laws are silent in time of war," and Duterte's war against drug trafficking and its lethal effects on humans is total war. The fight against drugs has become relentless, uncompromising, and nonnegotiable. It is fatal and it affects all classes and all ages which call for a united and nationwide effort and urgency. For these reasons, President Rodrigo "Digong" Roa Duterte should be given the leverage and space to pursue his crusade against drugs, corruption, and criminality unhampered by bureaucratic niceties and legalistic obstacles. [continues 378 words]
We want to know what the young are thinking about. What are their thoughts on current issues? We welcome contributions from the twentysomething and below.- Ed. HUNDREDS HAVE died and thousands have voluntarily surrendered to authorities in the course of President Duterte's war on drugs. And though his violent and urgent campaign has done much to bring the issue to the national conversation, it also reveals how ill-equipped our legal infrastructure is in dealing with the victims of this war. The infrastructure required for the rehabilitation of drug users is lacking, and the way our law treats drug offenders is unfair and dehumanizing. [continues 845 words]
This administration will be remembered for institutionalizing mass killings as the ultimate crime-fighting tool. Public acquiescence to the mass killings is among the most astonishing elements in this vicious war on drugs. President Duterte, the architect of the crime-fighting strategy, may be glad to know that these days, when people are exasperated with criminality and even corruption and other forms of abuse in government, they ask why the crooks are still alive. "There oughta be a law" has been replaced with "they oughta be shot" - fatally, if possible. [continues 825 words]
STORIES about shenanigans at the Cebu City Jail have been doing the rounds for years. Because the jail is being run by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology (BJMP), tackling the complaints related to these "stories" has been dependent not on the local government officials but on a national government agency. For years, BJMP 7 officials tended to look the other way allowing those "stories" to persist. The raid conducted early Saturday, done in full force by various law enforcement units, was thus a welcome development. It was called, like in previous raids, "Operation Greyhound" but it was an operation like no other before it in intensity and scope. No wonder it also netted the biggest catch in years. [continues 262 words]
Although President Duterte's police methods have drawn concern in various parts of the world, even those who deplore his methods at home are praying that his 'war on drugs' would somehow succeed. However, international experts who have done extensive studies on the global drug wars are deeply pessimistic; they describe the "war on drugs" as a failed strategy, and are calling for a major policy "rethink." These experts have not condemned the extrajudicial killings, the shoot-on-sight and "surrender or else" orders in the present drug war, as some UN officials, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and certain international publications have. Their studies precede DU30's war by at least a couple of years. [continues 1824 words]
A TOTAL of 3,257 extrajudicial killings (EJKs) were committed during the Marcos dictatorship. In contrast, there were 805 drug-related fatalities from May 10 (when Rodrigo Duterte emerged winner of the presidential election) to Aug. 12, per the INQUIRER count. If the current rate continues, the total number of EJKs for the six years of the Duterte administration will end up about 700 percent more than the killings committed during the 14 years of the Marcos dictatorship. President Duterte is either ill-advised or terribly underestimating the risk that he can be held liable at the International Criminal Court, given the circumstances of the killings. [continues 804 words]
The killings will continue, but martial law is not in the picture - that's my reading of President Duterte's speech directed at Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno. This administration doesn't need martial law, although it might declare a state of emergency in Sulu to crush the Abu Sayyaf. If the ongoing nationwide killing spree is sustained at its current rate, it may even surpass the body count of victims during martial law. Ferdinand Marcos at least tried to coat his authoritarian acts with legal niceties. [continues 1013 words]
Chief Justice Sereno went slightly off tangent when she instructed judges named in the "narco list" not to submit to the police without a warrant. She then wrote President Duterte to express her discomfort over the Name and Shame effort. The President, when he exposed the explosive list of names, did not ask the judges to be arrested. He asked those named to report to the Supreme Court, which has jurisdiction over them. The Court, eventually, did the right thing. It asked that the police furnish it with a bill of particulars and requested a retired justice to oversee an internal inquiry. [continues 823 words]
Group Warns That Overestimating the Role of Organized Crime in the Illegal Pot Industry Will Simply Perpetuate the Black Market Contrary to common RCMP wisdom, organized crime groups play a relatively small role in Canada's underground cannabis trade, and the majority of people behind the country's illegal grow operations and dispensaries are otherwise law-abiding, a group of academics and small-scale marijuana businesses have told the federal legalization task force. A written submission co-authored by a prominent criminologist on behalf of a drug-policy advocacy group cites government data that showed just 5 per cent of marijuana criminal cases over an eight-year period had links to organized crime or street gangs. [continues 751 words]
Let me start with a disclosure and declaration: Because of the contrarian position that I am taking on the war on drugs, I want to declare that: 1) I don't know anyone in the list of narco-politicians and drug coddlers that President Duterte unveiled on Sunday - not one friend or relative or townmate whom I would wish to shield from the punitive hand of the law and public shame. 2) I personally do not use drugs, and am repelled by the very thought of them. And it has been the good fortune of my family not to see any member fall victim to drug addiction. [continues 1067 words]
It's just hyperbole, President Duterte said in explaining his promise to kill local government executives and other officials involved in drugs. He may be telling the truth. Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. of Albuera town in Leyte, after all, is still alive after turning himself in last week and naming his son Kerwin, still at large, as a drug dealer. As of yesterday afternoon, Mayor Mamaulan Abinal Mulok of Maguing, Lanao del Sur and former mayor Mohammad Ali Abu Abinal also remained alive after presenting themselves to Philippine National Police chief Ronald dela Rosa at Camp Crame last Friday. [continues 973 words]
BANGKOK In a backroom heavy with sawdust, Mr Akkarin Puri, 33, carefully examines the veneer of a half-finished guitar. There was a time when the craftsman's attention was more focused on inhaling the vapours from a pill of yaba - a methamphetamine - heated over a flame. In fact, by the age of 21, his drug habit had landed him in juvenile detention at least six times and a military lock-up for 18 months. There, he tried to rob a fellow addict to fund his next fix and landed himself in jail for another eight years. It was while doing time in a particularly notorious prison, in Pathum Thani province next to Bangkok, that he saw up close one of the gravest consequences of the kingdom's long-running "war on drugs". [continues 1319 words]
VICE PRESIDENT Leni Robredo has deplored the lack of public outcry against extrajudicial killings that have come with President Duterte's takeno-prisoners war on drugs. "I hope my being vocal against [extrajudicial killings] inspires many others to follow suit because there really has to be public outcry. The way I see it, there has been very little public outcry in the recent past," Robredo told the INQUIRER in an interview on Wednesday. On the same day, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) issued a statement saying it was "greatly concerned" about the killings of suspected drug users and dealers in the Philippines. [continues 877 words]
MANILA - Since Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines just over a month ago, promising to get tough on crime by having the police and the military kill drug suspects, 420 people have been killed in the campaign, according to tallies of police reports by the local news media. Most were killed in confrontations with the police, while 154 were killed by unidentified vigilantes. This has prompted 114,833 people to turn themselves in, as either drug addicts or dealers, since Mr. Duterte took office, according to national police logs. [continues 1142 words]
MANILA, Philippines - Since Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines just over a month ago, promising to get tough on crime by having the police and the military kill drug suspects, 420 people have been killed in the campaign, according to tallies of police reports by the local news media. Most were killed in confrontations with the police, while 154 were killed by unidentified vigilantes. Addressing Congress last week in his first State of the Nation address, Mr. Duterte reiterated his take-no-prisoners approach, ordering the police to "triple" their efforts against crime. [continues 153 words]
MANILA, Philippines - Since Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines just over a month ago, promising to get tough on crime by having the police and the military kill drug suspects, 420 people have been killed in the campaign, according to tallies of police reports by the local news media. Most were killed in confrontations with the police, while 154 were killed by unidentified vigilantes. This has prompted 114,833 people to turn themselves in, as either drug addicts or dealers, since Duterte took office, according to national police logs. [continues 336 words]
NO ONE claims to support the killing of the innocent, but it seems that many are willing to leave the judgment of innocence to the police and the vigilantes. Even worse, many are seeing death itself as proof of one's guilt. "He must have been a drug pusher," said some netizens of Emmanuel Jose Pavia, the Ateneo High School teacher who was shot and killed in Marikina. "They were killed because they deserved it. Kill pa more!" exclaimed one commenter on one of the many reports-now commonplace-on the corpses of suspected drug pushers found in the streets. [continues 869 words]
A religious group regularly visits the New Bilibid Prison (NBP) to preach love and hope to inmates and offer women and illegal drugs on the side, according to reports reaching Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II. "We have found out some of the possibly religious personnel who were conducting preaching inside the penitentiary have been used to bring drugs as well as prostitutes inside the penitentiary," Aguirre said, citing information he received from a member of a non-government organization and three NBP guards who visited him recently. [continues 717 words]
Corazon Aquino unleashed the freedom fighter in the Pinoy. Fidel Ramos unleashed the team spirit. Rodrigo Duterte is unleashing... our inner homicidal maniac? Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I can't help wondering if this "killing time" under Dirty Rody emboldened Army reservist Von Tanto to shoot that biker with whom he had a vehicular altercation Monday night. CCTV footage showed Tanto not just shooting to kill rather than wound, but finishing off Mark Vincent Geralde as the biker lay dying on the pavement. A stray bullet apparently hit and critically wounded a teenage girl standing in front of her house nearby. [continues 992 words]
