THE majority of Filipinos believe there are drug suspects who are still getting killed despite surrendering to the police, the latest Social Weather Stations survey revealed Friday.
But Malacañang kept mum on the results of the survey despite the efforts of reporters to ask for comments.
Some 63 percent of those polled believe there are suspects in the illegal drug trade who are being killed despite surrendering, with 31 percent saying that they strongly agree and 32 percent who somewhat agree. Those undecided stood at 17 percent.
But 11 percent of those polled “somewhat disagreed” and nine percent “strongly disagreed” that there are drug suspects who are still being killed despite surrendering.
In other developments:
• National Capital Region Police Office Chief Oscar Albayalde said Friday the drug suspects surrendering but still being killed were those who had returned to their illegal activities.
“Some of them surrender thinking they would be removed from the list, but it doesn’t work that way,” Albayalde said in reaction to the SWS survey.
• Albayalde on Friday relieved all the members of the Caloocan police force and replaced them with 1,000 policemen from the NCRPO-RPSB. They will undergo three months of retraining at Camp Bagong Diwa in Bicutan.
Albayalde told the 1,000 newly assigned policemen to strictly adhere to discipline so as not to commit mistakes while doing their duty.
The proportion of those who agreed that some drug suspects who had already surrendered to the police were still ending up dead was highest in Metro Manila at 75 percent, followed by Mindanao at 63 percent, Balance Luzon at 63 percent and the Visayas at 53 percent.
In the same survey, some 17 percent of respondents said they knew someone who was falsely summoned for “Oplan Tokhang,” the government’s flagship anti-drug campaign, but was not really a drug pusher, while 83 percent said they did not know anyone.
The highest proportion of those who knew someone who had been summoned for Oplan Tokhang despite not being a drug pusher was in Metro Manila at 22 percent, followed by the Visayas at 18 percent and Balance Luzon and Mindanao at 16 percent.
Oplan Tokhang, which means “knock and plead,” is a police operation whereby authorities knock on the doors of suspected drug users or pushers and ask them to surrender.
President Rodrigo Duterte in late January ordered the PNP to stop its anti-illegal drug operations after the policemen allegedly involved in an extortion racket kidnapped South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo, killed him right inside Camp Crame, and had his body cremated in a funeral parlor and his ashes flushed down the toilet.
While the opinion surveys showed the Duterte administration’s drug war had widespread public support, it had also come under fire from local and international human rights groups, prompted by the killings of more than 7,000 mainly poor users and pushers”•including those that police simply dismissed as “deaths under investigation””•or people found dead in the streets, some appearing to have been killed vigilante-style.
The Palace had earlier questioned the way certain questions were framed in the 2nd Quarter 2017 SWS Survey, saying those were “leading and pointed” and “may have unduly influenced the answers of respondents.”
The non-commissioned June 2017 Social Weather Survey was conducted from June 23 to 26 using face-to-face interviews of 1,200 adults and had sampling margin of error at ±3 percent for the national percentages.