PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte said Wednesday he would return the conduct of bloody anti-drug operations to the Philippine National Police “• without doing any major reforms to the institution he once called “corrupt to the core.”
“Whether I like it or not, I have to return the power to the police,” Duterte said in a speech at Fort Magsaysay, Nueva Ecija.
Duterte had earlier pulled out the PNP and assigned the PDEA instead to take over the campaign due to mounting public criticism over the thousands killed associated in his bloody drug war, particularly in several cases involving teenagers allegedly at the hands of the Caloocan City police.
Duterte in January made a similar move apparently sidelining the PNP, describing the police force then as “corrupt to the core” and giving PDEA the lead role in the drug war.
Last November 17, PNP chief Ronald Dela Rosa admitted the police force should have undertaken ‘internal cleansing’ first before its all-out war on illegal drugs.
“We admit that we had not totally cleansed our ranks before we waged the war on drugs. We should have cleansed our ranks before we waged the war on drugs so that scalawag narco cops would not be part of it,” Dela Rosa said.