“License to Kill”

warrants. Family members often reported hearing beatings and their loved one begging for
their lives. The shootings could happen immediately, behind closed doors or on the street,
or the gunmen might take the suspect away, where minutes later shots would ring out and
local residents would find the body, often with hands tied or the head wrapped in plastic.
Local residents often said they saw
uniformed police in the vicinity before the
“
Now, if you’re really crazy and
your body cannot go back to
incident, securing the perimeter—but
normal, I’ll just be sending you
even if not visible before a shooting,
ropes. Hang yourselves, you
special crime scene investigators would
sons of whores, I already told
arrive within minutes. A previously
you no.”
unknown .38 caliber handgun and a ―Rodrigo Duterte, December 13, 2016
packet of shabu almost always would be
found next to the body. And instead of
fleeing from the police, the gunmen would mingle with them. Human Rights Watch is not
aware of a single arrest made in connection with any of the killings we documented.
Human Rights Watch examined police reports in virtually all of the cases we investigated.
The accounts differed markedly from those provided by the relatives we interviewed, yet they
were very similar to each other. The suspect was invariably described as a dealer who
attempted to sell to undercover officers conducting a “buy-bust” operation. Specialized local
anti-drug units called Station Anti-Illegal Drug Special Operations Task Units (SAID-SOTU)
were usually involved. According to the reports, the suspect, after being put under arrest and
sometimes handcuffed, allegedly pulled out a weapon and sought to shoot the police. In
every case, however, the suspect was killed and none of the arresting officers were harmed,
with the sole exception of one case in which an officer is alleged to have been shot in the
leg. In most cases, the police “found” shabu on or near the victim’s corpse.
While the Philippine National Police have publicly sought to distinguish between suspects
killed while resisting police arrest and killings by “unknown gunmen” or “vigilantes,”
Human Rights Watch found no such distinction in the cases investigated. In several cases
we investigated, the police dismissed allegations of involvement and instead classified
such killings as “found bodies” or “deaths under investigation” when only hours before
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