Philippines drug war & extrajudicial killngs of 2016: Comparisons with Thailand 2003

STATE KILLING

Philippines drug war & extrajudicial killings of 2016: Comparisons with Thailand 2003  

A total of 402 suspected drug traffickers have been shot dead with at least 4,418 arrested in the one month since Rodrigo Duterte, the new president of the Philippines, took office at the end of June.

Shootings have been accompanied by a non-stop stream of images of corpses and inmates in standing room only crowded prisons (see here).

Shootings without due process of law also seem to be concentrated among low-level drug trade functionaries, if the high-level drug functionaries accept the announced procedures they automatically get due process of law, as in the case of Cebu businessman Peter Lim (see here).

Duterte won the Philippine presidency on an anti-crime platform and promised to end crime and corruption in six months.

The popular law and order policy has included encouraging police and ordinary citizens to act as vigilantes, take the law into their own hands and shoot suspected drug dealers with promised cash rewards.

If vigilantism is normally conceived as ordinary citizens taking the law into their own hands, this however seems to be a different variety or offshoot of vigilantism in which security forces and police are involved and seem to do most of the work.

Acting as an agent of the public, security forces could almost be viewed as carrying out vigilante acts on behalf of the public.

Human rights organizations and the UN have condemned the shootings.

Philippine Senator Leila De Lima called for an end to Duterte's brand of vigilante justice in a speech on Tuesday:

"We must call for the accountability of state actors responsible for this terrifying trend in law enforcement, and the investigation of killings perpetrated by the vigilante assassins," she declared.

This new vigilantism, however, is incredibly popular and the question of why it is so popular is an important question to answer, even for those morally opposed to it.

It is instructive to look at a local case of how the new drug policy has been applied.




LOCAL POWERFUL ELITES INVOLVED IN DRUG TRADE: CASE OF ALBUERA, LEYTE  

The family of the mayor of the town of Albuera on the island of Leyte, Rolando Espinosa, was recently linked to to the drug trade. Over the period of a few days a drama played out.

First, two bodyguards and three employees of the mayor were arrested for selling drugs during a police operation on a Thursday afternoon. Two of the employees took care of the mayor’s fighting cocks. Some of the men were armed, but didn’t put up a fight.

Four other suspects escaped arrest, fleeing to the house of the mayor's son, Kerwin Espinosa, located inside the gated compound of his father.

The local police chief declared that the police had "no authority to barge into the compound after the gate was locked" clearly indicating the limitations of Duterte's new policies vis-a-vis powerful local elites.

The mayor was reported to have gone on leave. A 24-hour deadline for the mayor to surrender was issued by Duterte or both the mayor and his son would be shot on sight.

Espinosa finally surrendered to the Philippines national police chief making a dramatic declaration that the police had permission to shoot his son, if he did not surrender. There were reports that the mayor's son had already fled the Philippines.

Police clashed with armed bodyguards of the mayor on Wednesday, killing six.

Local people, in general, seem to have been aware of the mayor's illegal activities as well as his impunity in the face of the law.




COMPARING THAILAND'S 2003 WAR ON DRUGS 

Thailand's "War on Drugs" of 2003, though similar to the Philippines war of 2016 was a lot less public with less media coverage and few images.

Observers commented that the 2003 Thai extrajudicial killings often took place at night with corpses quickly removed.

Lists were quickly assembled and some people on these lists faced quick deaths that seemed unjustified according to the evidence available at the time. The final death tallies were made rather imprecisely by taking the abnormally high death rate during the war and subtracting off the normal death rate, providing an estimate of killings.

To my knowledge, a research project to collect death certificates for the period of the killings to systematically determine cause of death has not been undertaken. Such a project might perhaps not be feasible or possible.Any official count and any independent count would face possible dangers and ethical considerations in doing interviews with witnesses.

The difference between a justified police shooting in self-defence and an execution-style killing in which police play the role of judge, jury and executioner is also hard to distinguish when there are already low levels of police accountability and transparency.  


VIGILANTISM AS GLOBAL WORLD HISTORICAL PHENOMENON

Now we turn from this local case of drug war vigilantism to the larger question of why vigilantism has been so popular historical around the world.

The recent volume Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective  sheds light on this phenomenon.

For over a hundred years, vigilante killings have been explained as the way that locals in rural areas, for whom an elite-oriented legal system had failed to provide adequate security and legal protections, enact their own regime of self-help justice.  

Communal justice in the Russian village dished out swift and cruel punishment to gangs of horse thieves

Seen in a global perspective, vigilantism or "lynching" is seen historically to have been an "ideology of communal justice" and "a form of communal self-defense against crime that is unchecked by the state."

In the history of post-World War II Southeast Asia, vigilantism has played a role in incidents of mass killing during the cold war era both in Indonesia circa 1965 and Thailand circa 1975, with the perceived "crime" perceived by certain segments of society to be ideological in nature, namely leftist communist ideologies.

More recently since the millennium, the focus has been on the problems of drug-dealing and drug addiction that societies face, first in Thailand during the 2003 War on Drugs and then in Philippines during the ongoing War on Drugs.

 WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 

Eric Haanstad's 2008 PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Constructing Order through Chaos: A State Ethnography of the Thai Police clearly shows what needs to be done in the way of research (available at the Thailand Imformation Center (TIC) at Chulalongkorn University's main library here & catalog here)

Currently, there is only scattered documentation on the victims of the 2003 War on Drugs extrajudicial killings in Thailand.

Theories on how the process of killing unfolds and either sustains itself or grinds to halt need to be formulated and compared with available historical information from different states and different historical eras.

One big problem, as the prominent Thai blogger named Bangkok Pundit points out, is that statements of large numbers of deaths are due to the differences between the normal death rate and the death rate during the period of killing.

Indirect measures of extrajudicial killings have been necessary to-date because the whole process of death reporting lacked government transparency in contrast with the heavily publicized process in the Philippines circa 2016.

One could imagine collecting together the thousands of death certificates from the period and then doing structured interviews with the families of the victims to try to ascertain what happened and construct an oral history

Whether this work is potentially too dangerous or whether it is unethical to put yourself as researcher in this position or to put a witness supplying information in this position where they give you information is also a question. These are all ethical concerns that might make the whole research project infeasible within an academic context. In an investigative reporting context, however, it might be feasible.

PLEA TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH & UNDERSTAND EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLING ON ITS OWN TERMS

Despite all the possible hurdles, it really behooves researchers in the social sciences to determine what actually happens during extended periods of extrajudicial killing and to write an accurate history of extra-judicial state killing in Thailand and Philippines in recent history.

After the extrajudicial killings have occurred, it is difficult to reconstruct the truth of what actually happened. Those involved in the killings may be negatively affected by these revelations.

The public itself may not want the facts and details of how a tiny of minority was killed without due process of law to be revealed either.

Democratically popular mass extrajudicial killing that advocates "crime fighting" without "due process of law" in the interests of perceived "law and order" is a reality.

Truly understanding why mass extrajudicial killing is so popular with so many people and how it fulfills perceived needs for these people in dealing with crime that threatens local communities is needed  to supplement the raw, and often not thoroughly informed, condemnation.

Extrajudicial killing must be understood on its own terms even by those who condemn it.

Only then will it be possible perhaps to work against the forces that cause it and prevent it in the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Berg, Manfred & Simon Wendt (2011) Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective, Palgrave.

Haanstad, Eric (2008) Constructing Order through Chaos: A State Ethnography of the Thai Police,
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison.


http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/asean/1051869/6-killed-in-philippine-police-anti-drug-operation

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/800946/leyte-mayor-on-leave-as-5-in-his-staff-caught-with-p1-9m-shabu

http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2016/08/03/albuera-leyte-encounter.html

http://www.rappler.com/nation/141607-duterte-surrender-rolando-espinosa-mayor

http://www.rappler.com/nation/141657-leyte-mayor-espinosa-surrenders-duterte-warning

http://k2.abs-cbnnews.com/news/08/02/16/narco-mayor-surrenders

History of food & drug regulation in Southeast Asia: Issues for research

Food safety and drug regulation issues often do make it to the news in ASEAN countries, such as Thailand, and the issues are also considered important in the general context of ASEAN (see here & here for instance).

However, there does not seem to be much formal academic research from a broader public health, historical or social sciences perspective, especially from the perspective favored here, the sociology of law which provides ethnography and interviewing as empirical methodology and powerful theory to contextual empirical findings (see here).

So one could say "food and drug regulation", from the perspective of sociology of law or economic history, is virgin territory for research.

There has, however, been high-caliber research in the US and Europe and this research can provide a good model for research on the history and sociology of regulatory law in Southeast Asia.

A wonderful overview and review of the literature on the "History of Food and Drug Regulation in the United States" has been put together by the scholar Dr. Marc T. Law  (see here). The overview is hosted at EH.net, a website run by the Economic History Association that shares resources related to economic history research and teaching.

Professor Law is an Associate Professor of economics at University of Vermont who does research on the economic history of regulation (see here). He has also published papers on the rise of the regulatory state in the US, medical and occupational licensing, utility regulation, truth-in-advertising regulation and food and drug regulation (see his papers here).

His overview history of US food and drug regulation is a useful vehicle for brainstorming issues and avenues to explore when researching the history of food and drug regulation in Southeast Asia.

ISSUES IN THE HISTORY OF FOOD & DRUG REGULATION

Many issues that are applicable to food and drug safety in Southeast Asian countries. There are also local issues applicable in the Southeast Asian context, food safety in wet markets and street vendors being two examples. Here is a list of some food and drug safety issues in Southeast Asia:  

1. Food adulteration incidents that make the news, nowadays often through consumer self-made videos posted to YouTube of adulterated food.

2. Patent medicines with dubious efficacy and safety.

3. The role of food and drug safety incidents or crises in driving the government to take food and drug safety measures.

4. Regulatory capture by larger firms seeking to push out or exclude smaller firms.

5. Food cleanliness, inspection and safety in wet markets, often documented nowadays with self-made videos of rats crawling over meat in a wet market or a rat in the donut display container, for instance (see here, here).

6. Chemical residues on vegetables found both in markets and retailers, including organically grown vegetables. This sort of research is done by independent NGOs and reported on in newspapers (see here & here).

7. Illegally imported drugs, lotions, cosmetics or other items such as cosmetic contact lenses that scratch the cornea (see here).

8. Food labeling for health conscious consumers and truth-in-advertising laws.

9. The use of food preservatives that may be hazardous to the health such as by street vendors selling fresh fruit (see here & here).

10. Globalized regulation has become an issue recently, with the US and EU passing laws and making regulatory efforts to eliminate forced migrant labour (or "slave" labour) from the export supply chain (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here).

More issues to be added as they are brainstormed.

(Source of photo at top: Wikipedia on food safety)

Police reform: Key concepts I

Presented here is an overview of a family of related concepts: police corruption, police misconduct, police integrity, taken from the work:

Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (2015) "Studying police integrity" in Measuring police integrity across the world: studies from established democracies and countries in transition. Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (ed) and Haberfeld, M R (ed). New York: Springer Publishing.

At the bottom of the page, a reading is also provided that I have used personally to review and assimilate these concepts.

FIVE MAJOR FORMS OF POLICE MISCONDUCT 

Five major forms of police misconduct that have been identified from sociological studies, independent commission reports and court cases in the US (Ivkovic, 2015, 1):

1. Use of excessive force.
2. Racial profiling.
3. Perjury.
4. Sexual misconduct.
5. Generalized police corruption.

POLICE MISCONDUCT: DIFFICULTY OF ROOTING OUT 

The goal of police reform is the reduction and elimination of police corruption and misconduct.

Getting rid of police misconduct can be a difficult process.

The direct study of police misconduct and discovering what is actually happening is very difficult, if not impossible, because police refuse to talk about misconduct among their own ranks with outsiders.

A universal so-called police "code of silence" works to conceal misconduct "with police officers fearing ostracism from their colleagues if they reveal anything about the misconduct of their fellow officers or fearing disciplinary and/or criminal consequences if their own misconduct is uncovered." (Ivkovic, 2015, 2).

POLICE INTEGRITY: A MORE POSITIVE CONCEPT 

The complement or inverse of police misconduct, police integrity is a more positive concept that police are willing to talk about and can provide a more solid basis for police reform.

Police integrity is defined as "the normative inclination among police to resist temptations to abuse the rights and privileges of their occupation" (Ivkovic, 2015, 3).

Surveys featuring scenarios in which police officers are subject to these temptations have been presented to the police forces of different countries and to different units working in the same police force and significant differences in "police integrity" have been found across forces and units (see overview here as well as Johnson (2003); Seksan Khruakham & Joongyeup Lee, (2013); Narin Phetthong & Anja Kutnjak Ivkovic (2015))

POLICE MISCONDUCT: AN ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEM 

This transient success and ultimate failure of "good cops" in weeding out "bad cops" highlights a key finding of researchers working in the area of police reform.

Police misconduct is an organizational problem and not a problem of single isolated "bad cops" (bad apples, rotten apples).

Blaming the problem on a few "bad apples" is really a refusal to admit and accept that the problem exists in the first place.

Police misconduct is an organizational problem that needs an organizational solution.

ROAD TO POLICE REFORM & POLICE INTEGRITY 

The road to police integrity according an organizational theory of police misconduct involves working on four dimensions:

1. Organizational rules and enforcement of those rules.

2. Techniques for controlling police misconduct including reactive investigations of misconduct based on complaints and discipline of police officers who violated rules as well as proactive investigations, education and integrity testing.

3. Curtailing the police code of silence.

4. Acknowledging that the social, economic and political environment surrounding police work influences the level of police integrity.

Hong Kong's police force perhaps stands as the best example of a police force that has implemented such an organizationally-based program of police reform.

Citizen oversight has been key to Hong Kong's success and an ever diminishing record of police misconduct incidents (see Hui, 2015).

AUDIO READING ON POLICE REFORM CONCEPTS 

From: Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (2015) "Studying police integrity" in Measuring police integrity across the world: studies from established democracies and countries in transition. Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (ed) and Haberfeld, M R (ed). New York: Springer Publishing.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hui, D. L. H. (2015). "Hong Kong: Police corruption and reforms." In K. R. Hope (Ed.), Police corruption and police reforms in developing societies (pp. 143-156). Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (2015) "Studying police integrity" in Measuring police integrity across the world: studies from established democracies and countries in transition. Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (ed) and Haberfeld, M R (ed). New York: Springer Publishing.

Johnson, David T. (2003) "Above the Law? Police Integrity in Japan". Social Science Japan Journal (SSJJ) 6(1): 19-37.

Narin Phetthong & Anja Kutnjak Ivkovic (2015) "Police integrity in Thailand". in Measuring police integrity across the world: studies from established democracies and countries in transition. Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (ed) and Haberfeld, M R (ed). New York: Springer Publishing.

Seksan Khruakham & Joongyeup Lee (2013). "Cross-Nation Comparison of the Intolerance to Police Misconduct: Findings from a Thai Police Cadet Survey". International Journal of Police Science & Management. September vol. 15 no. 3 237-245.

Lifestyle audits: Casinos & drug deals at police headquarters

When you hear the facts of this police corruption case, it is simply hard to believe (see 07-01-2015 Bangkok Post article here).

A low-ranking police officer worked at provincial police headquarters in Chiang Rai in northern Thailand

The police officer managed to become a so-called "influential figure" (also known as "mafia leader" or "godfather" in other countries) right under the noses of the people he worked with.

The police officer ran two gambling casinos, apparently in Burma.

He ran through large amounts of money doing lord knows what (gambling? girls? fast cars? houses?) falling deeply into debt to the tune of 17 million baht.

The police officer then allegedly turned to drug dealing in order to get some quick money to clear his big debts.

But the fact that you could spend large amounts of money and run up massive debts and no one around you would notice seems quite unbelievable.

Perhaps people did see the police officer spending large amounts of money but kept their mouths shut, exercising the so-called "code of silence" of police forces worldwide in which police refuse to inform or blow the whistle on the police misconduct of fellow police officers.

ASSET DECLARATIONS & LIFESTYLE AUDITS 

There do exist worldwide best practices employed by exemplary police forces such as Hong Kong's to avoid and fight police corruption

These anti-police corruption measures include asset declarations and lifestyle audits.

The reasoning goes like this:

"Declarations of assets, property and liabilities together with lifestyle audits for even police officers low in the hierarchy could track unusual accumulations of wealth over the whole course of a career" (see here).

Why these measures to fight police corruption are not being used in Thailand is anyone's guess.

CODE OF SILENCE? 

Perhaps people did see the police officer spending large amounts of money but kept their mouths shut, exercising the so-called "code of silence" of police forces worldwide in which police refuse to inform or blow the whistle on the police misconduct of fellow police officers.

After a long period of surveillance by police, the police officer was finally caught selling large amounts of drugs this week (180,000 methamphetamine pills), arrested and an investigation was initiated to see how he obtained his assets.

This "investigation" happening only now raises a key point.

Knowledge about police officer assets should happen proactively before police misconduct occurs and should involve everyone at all levels of the organization.

PROACTIVE WHOLE ORGANIZATION POLICIES 

Police corruption and misconduct is an organizational problem.

To put an end to these problems, mechanisms to support police integrity at the level of the whole organization should be set up proactively to get organizational level solutions.

The "rotten apple" theory of police corruption that blames police misconduct on a few bad apples has been shown to be an ineffective way of defining and dealing with the problem (see here)

The police officer in this case was 17 million baht in debt, probably to informal money lenders, not banks, so there would be no formal record of the debts, so the police officer could have easily lied and falsified asset declarations, if these were required.

However, lifestyle audits would certainly reveal that something was happening.

And this gets at the fact that is almost unbelievable, that he did this at provincial police headquarters that oversees the police force for the whole province without anyone noticing.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia photo "ยาบ้า" by พีรพล อนุตรโสตถิ์ (journalist) here)

Dirty Harry death squad fantasyland of Philippines presidential election

What happens when people can't distinguish Hollywood movies from reality?

You may get a movie star or self-styled movie star running for president.

Enter Rodrigo Duterte, front-running Philippine presidential candidate.

Duterte has built up an image for himself as being a Dirty Harry-style macho death squad superhero (nicknamed "the punisher") who can cut through the BS of the law, courts, trials and due process and just shoot the criminals dead, no questions asked, trailing behind a brilliant record of law enforcement (see here)

"When I said I’ll stop criminality, I’ll stop criminality. If I have to kill you, I’ll kill you. Personally,” is his signature line.

FOR REAL ECONOMIC PROGRESS, KILL SOME PEOPLE

Killing is how to make a model city too.

Silicon Valley may be famous for Steve Jobs and computers, New York and Singapore for high finance, but killing people is what has made Davao a model city:

"Davao has been touted to be one of the safest cities of the world because its mayor has been able to enforce the rule of law... Davao City is indeed impressive. Traffic is managed well. People feel safe walking the streets at night. Only in Davao City will one see motorists abiding by a 30-km/hr speed limit. Only in Davao City will one experience not having to pay parking fees in malls. Everyone follows the executive ordinances of the Office of the City Mayor. Everyone seems to be disciplined: residents, businesses, politicians and the police."

And what about educational reform that could potentially make Filipinos as rich as people in Singapore or Silicon Valley in the future.

"Duterte said learning unnecessary numbers and signs in Mathematics does not serve any useful purpose.... He said students should not be pressured in school with “sine, cosine” as these are not applicable when they go job-hunting." (see here).

Little does Duterte know, the Philippines has had a comprehensive educational reform program in place since 2011 (see here & here).

Duterte wants to give police a five-fold increase in salary (see here), but what about low-paid hardworking teachers who are educating the future of the Philippines? Is their work less valuable?

BACK TO THE REAL WORLD   

Slow down for a moment.

Who exactly was killed?  Who did the killing? How many were killed? How many of them were children? How many of them were not even criminals at all?

For this, we have to turn to human rights organizations and the UN to try to piece together the puzzle of death squads and extrajudicial killing years after they happen.

"According to Amnesty International and local human rights groups, there were over 300 people killed in Davao City by death squads between 1998 and 2005. The rate of killing accelerated after this so that between 2005 and 2008 death squads were responsible for between 700 and 720 murders... the victims were selected because they were suspected of being drug dealers, petty criminals and street children aged as young as 14.... It was reported that local officials in some areas advocated a “shoot to kill” policy with respect to criminal suspects resisting arrest. ... the death squads later began to offer 'guns for hire' services targeting individuals for reasons unrelated to crime." (see here & here).

In one body disposal area, "pieces of long bones, skulls and other remains .... belong to at least six persons, including a female child ... Some of the skeletal remains were also found to have torture marks. Last month, four persons, including a 12-year old boy, were killed by motor-cycle riding gun-men." (see here)

In other words:

1. Criminal suspects were killed, some of them likely innocent.
2. Some of them children.
3. Some of them were petty criminals and street children undeserving of a death sentence.
4. The killers, feeling empowered, began to offer murder as a service to anyone who would pay the price.

When UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions in 2007, Philip Alston, submitted his final report he found that military death squads had "eliminated civil society leaders, including human rights defenders, trade unionists and land reform advocates, intimidated a vast number of civil society actors, and narrowed the country’s political discourse.... Alston, on February, 2007 stated that the military made alibis or denials on its role about 800 deaths of activists and journalists since 2001."

The very untransparent nature of death squads and extrajudicial killings means we cannot be sure of how many of the killings were of this sort, politically motivated killings of people who were not  criminals at all.

JUDGE, JURY & EXECUTIONER

So who exactly was judge, jury and executioner?

"Members of the death squad were managed by either currently serving or ex-police officers, according to Human Rights Watch. These officers provided the assailants with training, weapons and ammunition, motorcycles, and information on the targets. Lists of targets were drawn up by police or barangay (village or district) officials. Information might include a name, address and a photograph and local police stations were allegedly pre-warned to facilitate the murders and escape of the assailants. Witnesses reported that police officers took a surprisingly long time to respond to incidents even where these occurred in the vicinity of police stations and officers neglected to follow basic investigative procedures, such as collecting bullet casings from the street. Human Rights Watch reported that the standard tactics of the killers was to arrive in small groups of two or three on unlicensed motorbikes. Victims would be stabbed or shot without warning during daytime in public areas such as bars, cafes, markets, shopping areas, jeepneys or tricycles and in the presence of numerous witnesses. Assailants were generally paid between 5,000 and 50,000 pesos (US$114 - US$1,147) for an assassination, depending on individual involved."

In other words, the whole law enforcement system was subverted. And we are supposed to be confident because these are good cops fighting bad cops, just like in the movies.

The trouble is that the "rotten apple" theory of police reform has long been discredited. Police misconduct is an organizational problem that requires an organizational solution (see here).

The Philippines has been riddled by police corruption and misconduct for a long time.

According to best practice that has worked in police forces from Hong Kong to Singapore, cultivating police integrity is the path away from police misconduct to police reform (read prior posting here).

THIS IS REALITY, NOT A MOVIE

From pictures of Duterte on the front of Time magazine parading through town on a chopper or posing with M-16s to declaring that if he is elected president of the Philippines he will make himself dictator and if congress tries to remove him, he will personally remove congress, Duterte entertains the viewer and voter with a movie script of epic proportions of his own construction (see here & here).

Like political rhetoric run amuck, Duterte specializes in machismo bragadoccio aimed at entertaining and winning votes.

He will bring back the death penalty Duterte declares, never mind that the Catholic church itself has declared that voters "cannot, in good conscience, support a candidate" who is working for the return of the death penalty (see here).

CONSTITUTION? WHAT CONSTITUTION? 

Running on a platform of dictatorship is essentially running on a platform to overthrow the constitution and the state as it is currently exists. As one commentator observes:

"He ought to see that his envisioned dictatorship will be an aberration of the Constitution because nowhere in our fundamental law does it say that one is allowed to use force without legitimate ends and due process. Police power is an inherent power of the state and includes the power to make and implement laws and to regulate behavior and enforce order. This power also comes with limits: (i) only the Legislative branch can determine laws including the scope of police power, (ii) everyone should be accorded due process, and (iii) everyone is equal before the law."

Like many other politicians in the past, Duterte is running on a "law & order" platform that actually shrinks the "rule of law" the legal concept it opposes: "There will be no rules, just arbitrary decisions. Thus, even if Duterte wins the elections, his exercise of power will be illegitimate" (see here on rule of law vs. law & order).

Perhaps in the end, it really does not matter what a candidate says but rather what the candidate does. Perhaps if Duterte is elected, he will make Manila and the country of Philippines like his safe Davao and rather than becoming a dictator, listen to and cooperate with the other two branches of government, the legislative and judicial which according to the logic of constitutions hold the executive branch in check.

Or maybe it will all boil down to the perfect excuse for a coup and military takeover of the government or perhaps yet another EDSA protest movement (EDSA IV) followed by coup. Before the last election in 2010 there were widespread worries of a coup.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Neistat, Anna, and Kay Seok. "You Can Die Any Time": Death Squad Killings in Mindanao. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, 2009. Print.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davao_death_squads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_killings_and_forced_disappearances_in_the_Philippines
https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/04/06/you-can-die-any-time/death-squad-killings-mindanao
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2007/philippines0607/index.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20080709051731/http://www.extrajudicialexecutions.org/reports/A_HRC_4_20_Add_3.pdf

Rule of law vs. law & order in Southeast Asian law

The ideas of "rule of law" and "law and order" form a conceptual pair with two different meanings, a popular meaning and a more formal well-defined and precise academic meaning.

INFORMAL MEANING

The popular meaning of "rule of law" stands as a call for reform in the face of excessive law enforcement, in a police state for instance. Since Myanmar has opened up the phrase has been widely used in diverse contexts as a call for social justice (Cheesman, 2015).

In contrast, the popular meaning of 'law and order' stands as a call for reform in the face of not enough law enforcement in a state experiencing excessive high levels of crime, especially violent crime (murder, assault, rape), crimes against property (robbery, burglary) or drug crimes (war on drugs) (see here, here, Flamm, 2005).

'Law and order' can stand for the longstanding non-democratic values in a country such as Myanmar whereas 'rule of law' opposes it as a popular call for reform (Cheesman, 2015).

"Law and order" can also stand as a popular call for reform in a democratic state experiencing a crime problem that the existing justice system is not able to handle.

Thaksin's war on drugs of 2003 and Philippine presidential candidate (and longstanding mayor of Davao, Mindanao) Duterte's death squad solution to drug dealers and corrupt police are examples of this.

These calls for "law and order" are naturally countered by those worried by the corruption and abuse of power that bypassing legal procedures or "due process" can naturally lead to.

FORMAL MEANING 

The formal academic meaning of "rule of law" captures an ideal of how law should be applied precisely and non-arbitrarily, if time, resources and economics were unlimited.

A formal meaning of "law and order" captures how swift justice is meted out to suspected law breakers with limited resources without absolute precision, bypassing time-consuming legal procedures in the interests of efficiency. Police power is typically increased, judicial discretion and the power of the courts curtailed and circumscribed and in extreme cases vigilante death squads are empowered and extrajudicial killings valorized (Mazzei, 2009)

Seen from the perspective of economics of law, the "law and order" concept seeks to minimize the number of guilty found innocent, "false negatives" in the language of statistical testing. whereas "rule of law" seeks to minimize the number of innocent found guilty (false positives) (see Polinsky & Shavell, 2007).

In summary, the twin concepts of "rule of law" and "law and order" are capable of capturing realities of everyday political rhetoric used in elections by politicians to gain votes that are not precise but do capture reality in the minds of voters.

At the same time, the twin concepts are capable of making the realities of law enforcement and criminal justice system operation precise and analyzable in an academic context.

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Cheesman, Nick (2015) "That Signifier of Desire, the Rule of Law". Social Research: An International Quarterly. Volume 82, Number 2, Summer 2015. (get here)

Flamm, Michael W. (2005). Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Columbia University Press. (see review here).

Mazzei, Julei (2009) Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces? How Paramilitary Groups Emerge and Challenge Democracy in Latin America, The University of North Carolina Press

Polinsky, A. Mitchell & Steven Shavell (2007) "The Theory of Public Enforcement of Law" in Handbook of Law and Economics, 1st Edition. Polinsky & Shavell (eds.). North Holland.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia, F. W. Pomeroy's 1906 statue of Justice on the dome of the Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court) in London, England, UK)

Difficulty of police reform: Accused rapist cop shoots investigative committee

After a police officer at a local police station located at Rayong, Thailand south of Bangkok was reported as having raped a Lao woman being held under detention, the chief of the station had formed a committee to investigate the officer.

On 14 December 2015, as the accused officer was brought to see the station chief in his office, the officer suddenly drew his gun and fired at the chief of police. The bullet hit the chief's neck and killed him instantly. He then shot another officer at work in the office and killed him.

As he ran to his pickup truck to escape, the officer managed to fire another 10 more shots but was finally shot dead. The officer had reportedly been severely stressed after being told he faced a disciplinary investigation (See "Accused rapist cop kills 2 fellow officers in Rayong," Jumphol Nikomruk, Bangkok Post, 14 Dec 2015 here).

Sexual misconduct is one of five major forms of police misconduct that have been identified from sociological studies, independent commission reports and court cases in the US (Ivkovic, 2015, 1), (the other four forms of police misconduct being use of excessive force, racial profiling, perjury and generalized police corruption).

POLICE MISCONDUCT: DIFFICULTY OF ROOTING OUT 

Getting rid of police misconduct can be a difficult process, as the above incident attests to.

First, a universal so-called police "code of silence" works to conceal misconduct "with police officers fearing ostracism from their colleagues if they reveal anything about the misconduct of their fellow officers or fearing disciplinary and/or criminal consequences if their own misconduct is uncovered." (Ivkovic, 2015, 2).

In what amounts to a cautionary tale for whistleblowers, the highway patrol officer said to be responsible for the first video clips of police bribery broadcast on TV in Thailand (Pol. Sen Sgt. Maj. Chit Thongchit) in 2003, was allegedly forced to resign from the police force and then allegedly assassinated by fellow police officers in 2009 (Ivkovic, 2015, 276) citing sources here, here and here.

The police officer had singlehandedly fought against police corruption and had exposed many police officers for police misconduct, he also had "filed a complaint about police in Prachuap Khiri Khan who had charged an innocent man with selling methamphetamine pills. This resulted in several senior and junior policemen being moved from the province. ... The death of the policeman ... gained a lot of media coverage due to his unrelenting fight against corruption. A native of Bangkok, Chit gained a reputation for being an honest cop when his team on a special assignment arrested policemen involved in cigarette smuggling in Khao Yoi district, Phetchaburi..." (from "Caught in the crossfire of love and hate," Bangkok Post, 2 Feb 2009 here).

POLICE MISCONDUCT: AN ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEM 

This transient success and ultimate failure of a single "good cop" in weeding out "bad cops" highlights a key finding of researchers working in the area of police reform, that police misconduct is an organizational problem and not a problem of single isolated "bad cops" (bad apples, rotten apples), nor is it the actions of single "good cops" that can ultimately reduce and eliminate police misconduct.

Blaming the problem on a few "bad apples" is really a refusal to admit and accept that the problem exists in the first place.

Police misconduct is an organizational problem that needs an organizational solution.

POLICE INTEGRITY: A MORE POSITIVE CONCEPT 

The goal of police reform is the reduction and elimination of police corruption and misconduct.

However, the direct study of police misconduct is very difficult, if not impossible, because police refuse to talk about misconduct among their own ranks with outsiders.

The complement or inverse of police misconduct, police integrity is a more positive concept that police are willing to talk about and can provide a more solid basis for police reform.

Police integrity is defined as "the normative inclination among police to resist temptations to abuse the rights and privileges of their occupation" (Ivkovic, 2015, 3).

Surveys featuring scenarios in which police officers are subject to these temptations have been presented to the police forces of different countries and to different units working in the same police force and significant differences in "police integrity" have been found across forces and units (see overview here as well as Johnson (2003); Seksan Khruakham & Joongyeup Lee, (2013); Narin Phetthong & Anja Kutnjak Ivkovic (2015))

ROAD TO POLICE REFORM & POLICE INTEGRITY 

The road to police integrity according an organizational theory of police misconduct involves working on four dimensions:

1. Organizational rules and enforcement of those rules.

2. Techniques for controlling police misconduct including reactive investigations of misconduct based on complaints and discipline of police officers who violated rules as well as proactive investigations, education and integrity testing.

3. Curtailing the police code of silence.

4. Acknowledging that the social, economic and political environment surrounding police work influences the level of police integrity.

Hong Kong's police force perhaps stands as the best example of a police force that has implemented such an organizationally-based program of police reform.

Citizen oversight has been key to Hong Kong's success and an ever diminishing record of police misconduct incidents (see Hui, 2015).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hui, D. L. H. (2015). "Hong Kong: Police corruption and reforms." In K. R. Hope (Ed.), Police corruption and police reforms in developing societies (pp. 143-156). Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (2015) "Studying police integrity" in Measuring police integrity across the world: studies from established democracies and countries in transition. Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (ed) and Haberfeld, M R (ed). New York: Springer Publishing.

Johnson, David T. (2003) "Above the Law? Police Integrity in Japan". Social Science Japan Journal (SSJJ) 6(1): 19-37.

Narin Phetthong & Anja Kutnjak Ivkovic (2015) "Police integrity in Thailand". in Measuring police integrity across the world: studies from established democracies and countries in transition. Ivkovic, Sanja Kutnjak (ed) and Haberfeld, M R (ed). New York: Springer Publishing.

Seksan Khruakham & Joongyeup Lee (2013). "Cross-Nation Comparison of the Intolerance to Police Misconduct: Findings from a Thai Police Cadet Survey". International Journal of Police Science & Management. September vol. 15 no. 3 237-245.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/archive/caught-in-the-crossfire-of-love-and-hate/10879

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/crime/794324/accused-rapist-cop-kills-2-fellow-officers-in-rayong