Policing the war on drugs and the transformation of urban space in Manila

Abstract

This article explores policing and urban ordering in the Philippine war on drugs. With an empirical point of departure in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Metro Manila, the article highlights the perspective of the state police in an area that has been heavily exposed to the drug war and can be considered as one of its hot spots. It is examined how inspirations from counter-insurgency strategies are implemented in policing the war on drugs and discussed how this form of policing is negotiated and what implications it produces on the ground. In doing so, the article asks, ‘how have counter-insurgency policing strategies transformed urban space and the possibility of life in the poorer sections of Manila’? Drawing on a conceptual framework on borders, policing and the production of fear, the article argues that there exists an intimate connection between the employed policing strategies and the transformation of urban space with the potential of fundamentally reconfiguring urban sociality in areas such as Bagong Silang.

Keywords

Policing violence urban borders war on drugs counter-insurgency Philippines

When Rodrigo Duterte assumed office as President of the Philippines on 30 June 2016, he issued a war on drugs with an officially sanctioned violent crackdown on drugs and crime. With the police in the central role, Duterte set aside the entire presidential intelligence fund for the drug war and started a nationwide campaign against illegal drugs and lawlessness. Two years into the drug war, close to 30,000 suspected drug personalities have been killed,¹ mainly small-time drug users and pushers from poor, urban slum areas around Metro Manila² (see also Warburg, 2017).

The urban has emerged as central in this war. Firstly, the vast majority of the killings have taken place in Manila with very severe impacts in poor urban areas in and around Metro Manila. Home to some of the country’s most marginalized, vulnerable, and exposed citizens, it is from these impoverished urban areas that most of the victims – overwhelmingly young, unemployed men – are from. As the urban appears increasingly dangerous, the provinces, most often rural areas or smaller towns, become a solution for the protection against the urban-centered war on drugs. Secondly, aside from the thousands of deaths, the strict drug policy has added to an already overburdened justice system³ and overcrowded jails.⁴ It has provided new opportunities for police profiteering via corruption and money-making practices (Coronel, 2017; Jensen and Hapal, 2018), and established, in a very real sense, a climate of fear, which has reconfigured social and moral orders in the urban space (Warburg and Jensen, in review). This has linked poor urban areas intimately with formal spaces of confinement in ways that are even more pronounced than before.

Finally, and what we focus on in this article, the war on drugs has transformed policing in Manila with significant repercussions for urban space. The modus operandi of the drug war in Manila is animated by two elements. First, the city of Davao on the Southern island of Mindanao has emerged as a central inspiration. This is where President Duterte became (in)famous for his local war on drugs and the killing of more than a thousand suspected drug dealers and addicts during his decade-long reign as mayor since the 1980s. It is this drug war that has come to Manila. The second inspiration, more or less explicit, comes from insurgency and counter-insurgency wars. For decades, a war between Muslim insurgency groups and the state has plagued Mindanao (Abinales, 2005; Lara, 2011) and since the early 1970s, the conflict between the state and the Maoist New People’s Army has costs thousands their lives (Rutten, 2008). From these conflicts in Davao, Mindanao and the country-side, a number of counter-insurgency policing strategies, including spatial bordering strategies, militarization, civil-military partnerships, infiltration and killings, have developed. These strategies have travelled to inform the drug war in Manila and transformed urban policing and urban space in the process.

In our analysis of the perspectives of the state police, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork on policing and local politics conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area, by each of the authors during the first six months of 2017 along with a decade-long engagement with Bagong Silang before the outbreak of the drug war. This includes participant observation on police activities and extensive interviews with police officers, community leaders, and residents among others. While our data are directly related to the situation in Bagong Silang, it is representative for how policing is carried out, who is targeted in the drug war and how urban space is configured in slum areas all around Manila. Against this backdrop, we explore policing in the war on drugs, how it is negotiated and what implications it produces on the ground. In doing so, we ask, ‘how have counter-insurgency policing strategies transformed urban space and the possibility of life in the poorer sections of Manila’?

We argue that there exists an intimate connection between the transformation of policing strategies employed in the drug war and the transformation of urban space. This argument contributes to a larger theoretical discussion about how policing is both produced by and productive of urban space. In many academic and policy accounts of policing (cf. Steinberg, 2008; UNODC, 2011; Wilson and Kelling, 1982), urban space is seen as something that determines policing. Policing simply reacts to the dangers of urban space. While this can take different forms, these accounts arguably focus on how policing is produced by the spaces in which it occurs. While this is the case in our article as well, where the putative disorder of the city requires the police to act in a certain way, our analysis also suggests that policing is productive of urban space. This perspective feeds into a burgeoning literature on policing and urban space (cf. Jensen, 2010; Koskela, 2000; Kyed and Albrecht, 2015; Wacquant, 2008). In this light, we illustrate how the police employ and produce processes of bordering and how this has the ability to transform urban space. A central feature of this transformation is the de facto spatialization – bordering – of the killings. In a very real sense, areas like Bagong Silang have been cordoned off – bordered – as a zone in which death is likely and where counter-insurgency strategies can be deployed. Embedded in these bordering practices is a deployment and production of fear, which in turn has caused the production and proliferation of endless new borders inside Bagong Silang as people try to stay safe – between them and the street, between neighbors, between friends, and in relation to the state. Furthermore, we argue that while these bordering practices are employed to stay safe, they are characterized by a fundamental unpredictability and illegibility of what may happen in the urban space (see also Green, 2010; Jensen, 1999; Ris⊘r, 2010).⁵ In this sense, policing is productive of urban space and if, indeed, people make up the infrastructure of the city, as suggested by Simone (2004), then the transformation of urban space as the practices of its people might be the enduring legacy of the war on drugs in places like Bagong Silang.

We organize our argument into three sections. The first section explores policing in the war on drugs. We briefly discuss policing before Duterte as a necessary stepping stone to understand the transformation during the drug war. Then we discuss the inspiration from Davao and the history of counter-insurgency wars. In the second section, we discuss the local impacts the employed policing strategies have on the policed and the police alike and for the transformation of urban space. We conclude the article by revisiting the central argument of how policing is both produced by and productive of urban space.

Transforming urban policing

During the presidential campaign in early 2016, Duterte established drugs as a threat to national security and claimed that the Philippines was on the brink of becoming a ‘narco-state’ with four million drug users out of a population of around 100 million – even risking further contamination if immediate measures were not taken. While the existence of a drug crisis remains questionable,⁶ Duterte’s framing gained traction among the general population, where drugs became one of the top concerns in the election (Pulse Asia Research, Inc., 2016). Stressing the urgency for action, Duterte was ready to resort to extraordinary measures to remove addicts, pushers and criminals from the streets (Quimpo, 2017). He went into the presidential campaign after serving as mayor in Davao City on the Southern island of Mindanao for more than two decades since the late 1980s, where he and his family continue to run local politics (Altez and Caday, 2017). In Davao, Duterte had earned himself the nickname ‘the punisher’ and a reputation as a man of action by using any means, foul or fair, in his resolute crackdown on crime. His approach to crime in Davao allegedly transformed the ‘murder capital of the Philippines’ into one of the most progressive cities in the country and the most peaceful city in Southeast Asia (Curato, 2017: 4). Using the transformation of Davao as platform, Duterte was elected president in a landslide victory (Thompson, 2016), where his message of law and order and ‘penal populism’ (Curato, 2016) resonated with voters. As president-elect, he called upon the police to kill drug personalities resisting arrest, and right after the presidential election on 9 May 2016, the spike in drug-related killings began (Coronel, 2017).

The initiation of the war on drugs had profound consequences for policing. In the Philippines, everyday policing consists of two different, formal policing structures: The Philippine National Police and the Barangay Justice System. As the main law enforcement agency, the Philippine National Police has the official mandate for police action and criminal investigation, and it is part of a national structure under the Department of the Interior and Local Government. The Barangay Justice System, on the other hand, is part of a local government structure and it is an essential part of everyday policing in barangays (districts or subdivisions) all over the Philippines of which Bagong Silang constitutes one. Each barangay has officials responsible for public safety; what is locally known as puroks (community leaders) and tanods (guards). Puroks are assigned a specific area, where they are responsible for maintaining peace and order, and tanods to help them settle minor disputes and report larger crimes and misconduct to the police.⁷ It is this system that has been radically reconfigured and transformed during the war on drugs.

We begin by exploring the inspirations from Duterte’s drug war in Davao. These connections are explicit and formed a central part of Duterte’s electoral platform. Then we move on to discuss the second set of inspirations from the various counter-insurgency wars that have characterized the Philippines almost since independence in 1946. While we cannot point to explicit inspirations, there exists what we, drawing on Wittgenstein, elsewhere refer to as ‘family resemblances’⁸ (Jensen, 2010; Walters, 2008) between policing in the drug war and counter-insurgency strategies.

From Davao to Manila

On 1 July 2016, the Chief of Police signed a Command Memorandum Circular, which officially operationalized the campaign plan and policy for the war on drugs with the police as its central enforcers (National Police Commission, 2016). The campaign plan dubbed ‘Operation Double Barrel’ targets high-value drug lords as well as small-time drug users, addicts, and pushers. The main component of the drug policy is the practice of tokhang, meaning ‘knock and plead’,⁹ where police officers go door to door to visit the homes of suspected drug personalities, advising them to surrender and keeping them under close surveillance. This practice is based on information from so-called watch lists with names and addresses of suspected drug personalities. The lists are compiled by puroks and recruited community members, who work as neighborhood watch dogs and monitor everything related to illegal drugs. This outsourcing of policing tasks to community members forms part of a government-funded program known as the Masa Masid¹⁰ (‘people observe’), which is supposed to bring more legitimacy to the drug war by involving civilian actors and making use of local knowledge about who is involved in drugs (Lamchek, 2017: 212). On the ground, however, it serves as a surveillance system, where those on the lists often end up dead; turning the watch lists into kill lists (Warburg and Jensen, forthcoming). Furthermore, reports by human rights organizations (Amnesty International, 2017; Human Rights Watch, 2017) link the police and the killings, arguing that while the police use tokhang for arrest, it is actually used as a cover for the police to go to houses of drug suspects, extort the families, kill suspects and make the scene look like an act of self-defense (see also, Coronel, 2017; Lamchek, 2017).¹¹ These reports illustrate that both the police and vigilante groups have been given free rein in the name of fighting drugs.

Tokhang is modeled after a policing strategy that was used as crime control in Davao during Duterte’s time as mayor. Here, the ‘knock-and-plead’ approach allegedly resulted in a rapid decrease in crime; at the same time, the murder rate spiked with more than 1400 killings (Human Rights Watch, 2009: 14–15). The Davao Death Squad, a vigilante group composed of police officers, ex-soldiers and former rebels, killed those deemed as ‘undesirable’; suspected drug dealers, rapists, and street children. The template for killing was motorcycle-riding assassinations and, according to testimonies from former hitmen,¹² the death squad members were operated from within the police’s anti-crime group and on the city’s payroll (Coronel, 2017; Lamchek, 2017). The killings in the current drug war bear many resemblances to those carried out by the Davao Death Squad, where drive-by shootings by masked assailants on motorcycles, colloquially referred to as ‘riding in tandem’, has become the main method of killing. This is, of course, in addition to those killed in legitimate police operations during tokhang, when suspects allegedly resist arrest forcing the police to shoot in self-defense.

As this model of policing was upscaled from Davao on the Southern island of Mindanao to the national stage in Manila in the north, the center of politics likewise shifted from Manila to Mindanao (Curato, 2017: 11) as did the political mentality. As the first president from Mindanao, Duterte emphasized this shift explicitly (Altez and Caday, 2017). While the political culture of the Philippines is animated by violence, poverty and corruption (McCoy, 2009; Sidel, 1999), what sets Mindanao apart is the widespread warfare, the rogue military and police counter-insurgency strategies (Tidwell, 2016). For many people in Manila, Mindanao is perceived as incarnating danger and violence, and as a place where human rights are translated into particular notions of honor and revenge (Rafael, 2016). Duterte has brought this mentality of warfare along with him to the presidency and to operationalize the drug war, he brought in key police officials from Mindanao. Ronald ‘Bato’ Dela Rosa, who served as a close ally and former police chief under Duterte in Davao, was appointed chief of the Philippine National Police at the inception of the drug war. Together, Duterte and Dela Rosa brought in other trusted officers from Mindanao to form the core of the anti-drug units with the responsibility to implement tokhang. These units have been referred to as the ‘Davao Boys’ (Baldwin and Marshall, 2017).

Personnel also went the other way. The successive corruption scandals and failures of the Philippine National Police that have marred the war on drugs did not result in major reforms. Instead of sacking corrupt police officers, the administration’s attempt to cleanse the police took the form of publicly scolding so-called scalawags (corrupt police officials) and sending them to Mindanao as a form of punishment. The redeployment of policing strategies and police personnel from Davao and Mindanao meant stricter regulations in the city and it signaled the targeting of drug personalities as legitimate, where the form of violence Duterte introduced and developed in Davao has become a standard practice nationwide during the war on drugs (Reyes, 2016: 125). It is these imaginaries and practices that have returned to transform and haunt Manila with the poor in the city’s fringe paying the price. In the SOBA (State of the Barangay Affair) address in 2017, the then station commander in Bagong Silang, himself straight from Mindanao, asserted to the crowd that if the Barangay personnel did not want to collaborate with the police in the war, ‘I will bring the hell of Mindanao here’. Few had any doubts what he meant.

Counter-insurgency and the war on drugs

It is tempting to conclude that the war on drugs emanated from Davao. However, we suggest that it, indeed also the Davao Death Squad, draws important inspirations from traditions of counter-insurgency that have evolved in relation to Marxist and Maoist (Kerkvliet, 1978; Rutten, 2008) and Moro nationalist and Islamic insurgencies (Lara, 2011), arguably since Philippine independence. We will not explore the different periods of counter-insurgency in detail as others have done this.¹³ Rather, we discuss some of the strategies from the vast literature on Philippine insurgencies that resemble findings from Bagong Silang in 2016–2017. These comprise spatialization of threats, killings, militarization, civil-military partnerships and the use of infiltrators. This allows us to understand the war on drugs as more than simply a passing phenomenon but as something embedded in Philippine history.

Spatialization of threats – Bordering violence

A central feature of counter-insurgency is to divide territory into areas that are dangerous, unstable or stable. Specific interventions are designed to turn dangerous areas into increasingly stable ones. While many counter-insurgency strategies insist that it is imperative to win the hearts and minds of the people (Kilcullen, 2010), many scholars argue that violence plays a crucial part in pacifying dangerous areas. In Jennifer Schirmer’s excellent account of the counter-insurgency war in Guatemala that claimed 80,000 lives in 1982 (Schirmer, 1998), the generals insisted that while beans (food and development) were imperative, it was all about bullets to pacify the dangerous areas in the beginning. While the counter-insurgency in Guatemala was particularly violent, similar forms of bordering can be identified in wars on drugs as we argue in relation to the war on drugs in Cape Town (Jensen, 2010).

Areas like Bagong Silang have not been labelled in the same way explicitly, however, policing practices, notably the killings, have de facto marked these areas as in need of specific violent intervention. Police officers described the neighborhood as a notorious place permeated by high rates of crime, violence and a widespread use of drugs. A place where misconduct, loitering and drinking in the streets are commonplace even though it is against city orders! However, the initiation of the drug war, they emphasized, had made a radical difference with a significant reduction in drugs, crime and misconduct. The officers took pride in this transformation and perceived the extraordinary measures of warfare-like methods as imperative. Officer Santos explained:

We are not sure if they still continue to use drugs and during police operation, we encounter them, they will die, you know. They will die, because we already gave them a chance to change, but they choose not to change.

While the officers stressed their obligation to serve and protect the people, a noticeable superiority existed with casual comments such as, ‘We are the police, they [the public] have to obey us’. This superiority pervaded in their perception of those turning to drugs, who they deemed worthless and inferior – people who bring crime, violence and human suffering into families and the community. According to Officer Cruz:

If you are influenced with drugs, you are confident to do the crime. If you are influenced, you just destroy your relatives or if you are addicted to drugs and you don’t have any money, you are forced to rob other people just to buy illegal drugs.

This perception of drug personalities is in line with the dominant state discourse on the securitization of drugs, which marks a moral boundary about who has the right to protection and who does not. It is a boundary between insiders and outsiders measured on an association to drugs, where drug personalities are the embodiment of threat against an orderly state and against whom violence is legitimate.¹⁴ In this sense, policing is a form of boundary work, where Bagong Silang constitutes a bordered space with a high concentration of residents considered as outsiders, thus, making it a particularly dangerous place due to its heavy policing. And much like in Davao, where the police were known to be notorious and engaged in extreme forms of violence and summary executions, the war on drugs in Bagong Silang, and similar poor areas of Manila, resemble landscapes of warfare, where the law in many cases is suspended – and where violence is a means by which to border in and border out.

Salvaging

While there is no clear evidence that ties Duterte to the operation of a death squad or ordering summary executions in Davao or in the war on the drugs, the Filipino state is no stranger to killing its own people. When former President Marcos imposed martial law during his authoritarian rule from 1972 to 1986, he rendered the political machine moot and clamped down on dissent by introducing salvaging: saving the nation through killings of lawless elements and figures of rebellion. This claimed tens of thousands of lives in a social cleansing of society (Quimpo, 2008: 28–33). As martial law was replaced with a fragile democracy with extensive corruption, poverty and continued insurgency, the killings continued. Especially in the insurgency wars against the New People’s Army (NPA), salvaging was a constant element, targeting not only insurgents but also union leaders, land rights organizers and human rights groups (AHRC, 2007). These latter killings were often carried out by masked assailants in drive-by shootings on motorcycles, ‘riding in tandem’, leaving little to no trace of evidence behind except for the victims sprawled out in the streets. These motorcycle-riding assassinations have become the hallmark of the killings in Bagong Silang.

Furthermore, as we argue elsewhere (Jensen and Hapal, 2015, 2018; Warburg and Jensen, forthcoming), the police also had a reputation of salvaging its own citizens before the war on drugs. In 2011, we identified at least five killings committed by the police. These killings in urban poor communities were never publicly condoned, nor were they investigated with any zeal. While the killings identified before the onset of the drug war were different, they drew on the same logics. As detailed elsewhere, police officers saw themselves as angels in a war on demoniyos (demons) with little right to life (Jensen and Hapal, 2018). To a great extent, Duterte’s war on drugs has been made possible exactly through this history of excessive violence and logic of killing.

Militarization

As indicated above, the police are willing and ready participants in the drug war. Arguably, one of the main reasons for this is because the form of policing introduced in the war on drugs allows the police to engage in the violence they deem necessary without being hampered by local politics and human rights. According to the police, this is a welcome break from the post-Marcos era since 1986, where the Philippine National Police underwent a process of demilitarization, decentralizing, and democratizing. As they had been prior to the Marcos regime, the police again became subordinate to local politics and strong political families (McCoy, 2009: 435; Sidel, 1999). Under Duterte, the police have reclaimed their autonomy and their role of salvaging the nation. Arguably, the parallel processes of demilitarization and re-politicization (as part of local political machineries) have been significant for the way in which the police approach their role and position of authority in the drug war because the status of the police seemed, in the minds of many officers, to have been diminished. In this way, the war on drugs became a promise of re-militarization and de-politicization with a drug policy allowing the discretionary power of the police to expand the law with violent forms of order-making. Indeed, one officer in Bagong Silang proudly exclaimed that the core of the police organization had been strengthened, ‘We now have a strong top’. Hence, policing should be interpreted in light of this institutional history as well as political incentives and personal aspirations (Fassin, 2017: 14), where the police attribute meaning to their actions, not only by doing work for what they perceive as the ‘greater good’, but also with ambitions for personal gain and positions of power (cf. Kyed, 2017).

Another dimension of militarization relates to the frequent redeployment of police personnel, especially between Manila and Mindanao. This strategy was designed to address the high levels of corruption by severing ties between the population and the police (Jensen and Hapal, 2018). As a result, the police have been confined to something akin to barrack life where their entanglements with local residents are intentionally kept at a minimum. This means that residents have very little chance of negotiating with police officers – something which had been central in dealing with the police in the past (Hapal and Jensen, 2017).

Civil-military partnerships

A central element in global counter-insurgency (Kilcullen, 2010; McCuen, 1966) and in Philippine counter-insurgency (Adam et al., 2014; Banlaoi, 2010) is civil-military partnerships, where civilians are drawn in (and forced) to participate in the war on the side of the state. Only by enrolling local people in the counter-insurgency, voluntarily or with a gun to their heads, can the state hope to win (Kilcullen, 2010; McCuen, 1966). Elsewhere (Jensen and Stepputat, 2014), we explore how civilian armed groups were implicated in counter-insurgency wars in Guatemala and South Africa to often devastating and always deeply transforming effects. In both cases, the respective political culture has been deeply affected by the arming of civilians and their implication in the conflicts. The same is true for the Philippines.

In the Philippines, the involvement of civilians in counter-insurgency drives has taken at least two explicit forms since the fall of the Marcos regime. In the immediate aftermath of the re-introduction of democracy, the then president Corazon Aquino declared a total war on communism and the NPA. The NPA had decided not to participate in the elections (Sidel and Hedman, 2000), and this refusal opened for the renewed war against them despite the NPA having built a strong support base in the general population as the most important resistance to the Marcos dictatorship. A central element in this counter-insurgency war was the so-called CAFGUs (Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Unit). CAFGUs can be traced to the Marcos counter-insurgency but only in post-martial law Philippines were they institutionalized nationwide to partake in the local struggle against insurgencies. While formally under army command, they quickly developed into what is known as private armies of strong political families. They were legitimized by perceived threats from insurgencies and basically given free reins to fight any challenge to local state power. Hence, they have been associated with massive human rights violations in the fight against the NPA (Sidel and Hedman, 2000) as well as in Mindanao (Adam et al., 2014). In counter-insurgency drives in Mindanao, CAFGUs worked side by side with Civilian Volunteer Organizations (CVO). Outside war zones, CVOs are in fact simply part of the Barangay Justice System. However, in counter-insurgency drives these peace officers appear to become almost weaponized and receive new roles in the fight against insurgents (Banlaoi, 2010).

While GAFGUs and CVOs have not been established officially as part of the war on drugs, it is quite clear that the Barangay Justice System has been transformed to become part of the war on drugs. Hence, the forms of local accountability that seemed to characterize purok leaders and tanods have been compromised as new forms of allegiance are demanded by political leaders. Local politics have, in other words, transformed along with the new roles of state officials. Furthermore, like in counter-insurgency drives there is a proliferation of armed civilians involved in the war on drugs. Apart from the often-unidentified vigilantes (riding in tandem), we identified a parallel structure to the Barangay Justice System, the Community Investigative Services (CIS). One member of the CIS explained in May 2017 that CIS is run by a former general of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. It aims to collect information about drug incidents in the local areas. Members do their rounds and then report to a coordinator at Barangay level who reports to someone above – allegedly in a luxury hotel in nearby Fairview. The CIS runs parallel to and recruits from the Barangay puroks and tanods. According to the informant, they do not receive extra payment for their work in CIS. In fact, he had to pay for his own badge and ID card, but they do receive a bonus for every piece of good information they send up the system. While this system in many ways replicates the Masa Masid, it extends it, making it more secretive and reveals a deep-seated mistrust in part of circles within the police structures of the formal Barangay Justice System and its willingness to be involved in the war on drugs.

Infiltration and collaboration

A final strategy is the use of infiltrators or collaborators. As Darius Rejali (2009) rightly points out, a central imperative of any counter-insurgency drive is the ability of the state to establish collaboration with and infiltrate those on the other side.¹⁵ This is often associated with treason (Thiranagama and Kelly, 2011) and therefore exceptionally destabilizing for local social orders. One example from the Philippines is the use of so-called Deep Penetration Agents (DPA). DPAs were acclaimed to have contributed to the radical weakening of the NPA in the years following the fall of Marcos. At different times in the history of the NPA insurgency, agents of the state were sent out to infiltrate the movement. During one of the more intense periods of struggle in the early 1990s, about a thousand NPA soldiers were charged with being DPA. Many died and these purges were accredited with a fundamental and crippling weakening of the NPA. In his book, To suffer thy comrades, former NPA soldier and survivor of the purges Robert Garcia (2001) tells the harrowing story of the fear of infiltration and the lack of trust in everybody. Garcia speculates that perhaps the regime did not send out the DPAs but that fear itself did most of the work.

Like salvaging, DPAs have made it into popular imagination. An article on an earlier drug war in Makati, another area in Manila, in 2002, the police were to deputize 74 DPAs in the effort to curb drugs (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2002). We did not hear of DPAs in Bagong Silang, however, as we have shown above, there were plenty of agents in the drug war who more or less openly worked for the state. Furthermore, as the next section will show, the fear of these infiltrators was palpable in Bagong Silang. While most residents suggested that they had nothing to fear because they were not involved with drugs, they were uncertain of their safety due to talks of unsettled scores and killings of ‘mistaken identities’ and innocent. The consequences of this uncertainty, we suggest, might be the most lingering effect of the drug war.

A politics of fear: Reconfiguring urban space

Having outlined the model of policing in the drug war, the discourse that followed, and the inspirations from counter-insurgency strategies that have transformed urban policing, we now turn to how these practices are negotiated and have reconfigured sociality in poor urban spaces. In other words, we turn from a focus on strategies of the state to perspectives of the implicated actors in Bagong Silang. We start by illustrating how fear is considered a necessary component by policing actors in the pursuit of peace and order and how this is negotiated before moving on to how it produces urban sociality characterized by high levels of mistrust.

Fear as a form of order-making

As the model of policing was scaled up from Davao to Manila, the number of killings increased radically. The rate of bodies piling up in the morgues, the free reins of the police to target drug users, and the level of ruthlessness in the drug war have, in a very real sense, created a climate of fear (Warburg and Jensen, forthcoming). This has been animated by bloodied corpses dumped in the streets, at times, with their hands bound, heads wrapped in duct tape and wearing a sign proclaiming their alleged crime (I am a drug pusher, do not imitate me). These scenes have been commonplace in urban slum areas like Bagong Silang since the initiation of the drug war, where the spectacle of violence humiliates and politicizes the bodies of suspected criminals (Reyes, 2016). The stark reality is directly accessible for the public to see with open caskets outside the houses of victims and funeral processions in the streets. To a great extent, the infrastructure of the city renders the drug war extremely visible (see also Glück and Low, 2017), which in turn serves to enhance the fear among the population. These images intimidated possible drug personalities and enforced a political promise (of salvaging the nation) by inscribing the notion of order in and on the bodies of those supposedly breaking the law. The climate of fear, we argue, derives directly from the model of counter-insurgency policing, where fear is embedded into order- and border-making practices.

Particularly central to this is the practice of drawing up watch lists with names of suspected drug users and pushers, which work as a monitoring and surveillance system only available for policing actors implementing tokhang. This has intensified fear and generated much insecurity in the community due to the significant correlation between the killings and the names on the list. According to the police in Bagong Silang, this practice works in their favor because the threat of violence or death can deter drug use: ‘If there are addicts killed from that place, the other addicts will now surrender. They will fear now. They fear to use drugs’. Employing violence, or the threat of violence, is not perceived as a disruptive force by the police. Rather, as fear is generated, the streets become more peaceful. While the official purpose of the list is to obtain order (monitor and offer rehabilitation to drug suspects), it produces violence and disorder – much in line with what De Goede et al. calls a ‘paradoxical register’ (De Goede et al., 2016: 9). Castro, a prominent purok leader, describes this contradictory way of policing:

When the ones on the list of the President are all killed, drugs will be stopped. Naturally! If they are really involved, they should be killed. Because if we release them, they will post bail and they will still continue selling drugs […]. Everyone wants peace, whether you are a drug user or whether you are a big-time. Peace is also for them. What is hard is, how can you give them peace if they continue to be drug pushers, drug users? What kind of peace will you give to them? It must be death.

In this way, the list becomes the tangible object of the more abstract boundary work carried out by the police. The intention of the list, however, is not only to have a list of names against whom intervention is deemed necessary. To a great extent, the list configures fear in a way so that it will affect change among those targeted in the drug war – and as a way of controlling the wider community through fear. Rivera, a purok leader of three years, who works in close collaboration with the police, has been collecting and managing information on the watch lists since the beginning of the drug war. She believes fear to be the most effective driver of change, ‘We need to make them fear for them to stop using drugs. It is effective this fear of being killed’. While aware of the violence inherent to the lists, she offered her brother’s name in order to discipline him, ‘He just needs to be threatened’. She explained how afraid her brother had become and consequently, he stopped using drugs and was no longer a burden to the family. In this case, the potential lethal threat of being on the list was used very intentionally. The purok leader instilled fear in her brother as a form of order-making; as a way of enforcing order (Fassin, 2013).

The strategy of employing fear resembles counter-insurgency strategies in different ways. First, the use and threat of violence directly resembles a spatialization of threats. In line with a key feature of counter-insurgency, policing actors in Bagong Silang negotiate the legitimacy of violence as a way of pacifying an area considered as dangerous. The employment of fear becomes an important strategy to control an area and make it more peaceful. Second, a militarization of the police has occurred, where the use of violence is consolidated through the power and authority extended to them at the initiation of the drug war. The expansion of police discretion renders the use of coercive force and the employment of fear legitimate. Finally, salvaging has been the main factor in establishing a climate of fear. The killings and the violence employed for security reasons, as argued by the state, is directly generating the fear that exists in Bagong Silang.

Mistrust and urban warfare

While counter-insurgency strategies are employed to ensure safety for (some) residents of Bagong Silang, they have produced an atmosphere of deep mistrust and created situations bordering on urban warfare. It is especially the use of civil-military partnerships and (would-be) infiltrators as central parts of policing and in the creation of lists that promotes this.

On the ground, the knowledge of the lists and their potential consequences have affected change far beyond (simply) the names on the list. While the existence of the lists is no secret very few are privy to them in any detail. Besides the police and the purok leaders, regular community members – infiltrators – are involved in drawing up lists. While it is well-known that surveillance and policing tasks have been outsourced to community members, the reporting of names often takes place anonymously or in private. In a sense, the lists become an invisible force of unpredictability, which has created a tension between a certainty that action will likely be taken at some point and an uncertainty about the unknown; who, when, where. Who is on the list? Who provides information to the police? When and where will an attack take place? Consequently, the lists are subject to much speculation, which are not only based on the actual content of the lists, but even more so about a fear of the unknown, of unpredictability in navigating urban space.

‘[Being on the list] is like a chick that went into an eagle’s nest […] Trouble, trouble and then they will kill you’, Alvin, a former drug addict, explained. To his knowledge, his name was not on the list and to keep it that way his tactic was to keep a low profile. That means staying out of trouble and inside after dark, where the risk of vigilante attacks is at its highest. Occasionally, he would advise pushers in the neighborhood to take their business (and trouble) elsewhere and tell motorcyclists to remove their bonnets wrapped around their heads in order for people not to mistake them for vigilantes,¹⁶ ‘You are never at ease. You are always on the lookout. Anytime, something might come up. You are always worried that there might be a shooting and that your family could get caught up in it’.

In line with a ‘negative potentiality’ (Vigh, 2011), community members are constantly concerned with the potentials for future negative effects an invisible force is capable of producing (p. 93). The frequent violent disruptions and unpredictable killings have produced a sense of deep mistrust, alertness, and vigilance among community members. It has changed a former demeanor of friendly neighborliness to one of guarded suspicion. In January 2017, Mendoza, an elderly woman and a long-time resident of Bagong Silang, explained how nine people near her house supposedly were on the list; one of whom had been killed. Since the beginning of the drug war, she has been careful and withdrawn from interactions with neighbors. Most of the time she sits in front of her small house observing life in the street. Here, she sees people buying and selling drugs, but she keeps quiet due to fear of being involved, ‘I am afraid. They might make up stories about me. You have to take care. […] Whatever it is I see, only my eyes are seeing it’. It is not uncommon to hear of wrongful accusations between neighbors. This has, of course, increased vigilance and mistrust in the community and changed relations even between the closest of neighbors as Flores, another long-time resident, explains:

Now, almost no one gets out of their house when darkness comes. We used to go outside our house and talk, listen and tell stories even late at night, but we can’t do that now, because we are afraid. We don’t know who can be trusted anymore.

For Alvin, Mendoza and Flores, fear and mistrust have disseminated everyday life and torn into social fabrics. They keep their distance to neighbors and friends due to suspicion and fear of involvement in drug-related incidents. Even by interaction with suspects, or just by knowing too much, you risk being connected to drugs and have your name on the list.

The infrastructure of the city serves to enhance, even intensify, this fragmented social cohesion. Manila is extremely densely populated, which is particularly pronounced in poor urban areas like Bagong Silang, where the small houses are packed together in a maze of narrow pathways. It is an intimate space due to the closeness and lack of privacy. Elsewhere, we discuss this as a form of compelling and compelled intimacy (Jensen and Hapal, 2015). On the one hand, intimacy ensures peoples survival – getting by, finding ways though intricate relationships. In that sense, intimacy is compelling. However, intimacy is also compelled in the sense of being unavoidable. The proximity of life, bodies and neighbors render privacy almost impossible. Hence, one needs to be good at managing these intimate relations. This is captured in the local concept of pakikisama (the ability and obligation to live together). People say that he or she is good at makisama. The drug war has radically reconfigured this with a shift from proximity to distance – away from pakikisama – between residents in Bagong Silang. And with the infrastructure of the modern city, which is increasingly securitized and fractured (Graham and McFarlane, 2015), it becomes easier to produce and maintain these divides.

While there has been no lack of accusations against the police for the killings, the scene on the ground appears more complex. There is a great uncertainty as to who exactly is behind the killings, who provides information to the police and what their motives are. With random by-standers and ‘mistaken identities’ being gunned down in vigilante attacks, there has been a rise in killings with motives deviating from being purely drug-related. Retaliation attacks, gang rivalries, and security provision have created an unpredictable and illegible terrain of violence. In many ways, a landscape of urban warfare has emerged into the everyday life of the city with the drug war (Graham, 2010). This includes, most commonly, confrontations between the state and its residents, but does far from exclude confrontations between the state police and other policing actors, between drug syndicates, and among neighbors and friends. To a great extent, this illegible terrain of violence has developed due to the counter-insurgency strategies of implementing civil-military partnerships and infiltrators as part of policing the drug war. The surveillance and reporting of possible targets with the use of civilians as neighborhood watch dogs (recruited community members for the Masa Masid) who collaborates with the police has been central to the high levels of fear and mistrust. This model of policing has caused regular community members to employ socially excluding strategies that go beyond those of the state in order to remain safe. As a consequence, relational and spatial orders marked by a fundamental unpredictability have emerged to transform the city.

The reconfigured urban space, however, has also transformed the approach of the police in their everyday policing. While the police never failed to emphasize their commitment to the drug war or to serve and protect the people of Bagong Silang, they likewise emphasized the challenges and risks of conducting anti-drug operations:

Being a police officer is not easy. Every time that you conduct patrol, it is not easy, because we don’t know if that is our last time to leave here. In Bagong Silang, there are lots of criminals, there are drugs addicts here. So, we don’t know, if we can go back to our family.

While there is a certain amount of pathos in this quote, it was not utterly without foundation. In March 2017, one of the most vocal protagonists of the drug war, involved in compiling lists and enforcing policing locally, was shot dead by unknown assailants ‘riding in tandem’. While there was no clear consensus that he was killed due to his role in the drug war, he told us just weeks before his death that he was aware of potential backlash, ‘Someone might go after me later on. They might take revenge on me’. Similar threats were expressed by an informant, in an off-hand manner, when he said about the local purok leader, ‘Maybe purok Tan will not survive the next election…’! These remarks are suggestive of high tensions even among those who police. Hence, the increasing instability and unpredictability that has emerged in the urban space is valid for the policed and the police alike. In this sense, the impact of violence has been social as much as physical, because it revolves around how violence is interpreted and acted upon and less about why people kill (Jensen, 1999). It is these relational aspects, so fundamental of policing (Kyed and Albrecht, 2015: 15), that have been reconfigured and has transformed urban life.

Conclusion: Policing and urban space

This article takes its empirical point of departure in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Manila, which has been heavily exposed to the drug war with a high rate of killings and a number of insidious consequences among its residents. It is in urban spaces like Bagong Silang that the local impacts of Duterte’s national war on drugs can be most acutely felt. In the article, we have explored policing in the drug war and what implications it has for urban space. As a way of concluding the article, let us briefly revisit the larger theoretical discussion on the relationship between policing and urban space. As set out in the introduction, our overarching argument is that policing and processes of bordering in the war on drugs are both produced by and productive of urban space.

Policing is produced by the city in several ways. Duterte and his henchmen would say that it is the debauchery of the city that allows drugs to flourish. Hence, city life is to blame for the many killings and has rendered this kind of policing necessary. On a more serious note, there exists an infrastructure in the city that enhances and intensifies the practices of bordering introduced in the drug war through an increasing securitization. Paradoxically, this includes the anonymity of the city, which helps maintain and produce divides between insiders and outsiders, as well as an extreme visibility of the impacts of the drug war. Both anonymity and visibility contribute to a perception of bordered and dangerous spaces within the city and, at the same time, it produces unpredictability and illegibility. Thus, policing is everywhere and nowhere; it is highly visible and deeply obscured.

Policing is also productive of the city. Redeploying, upscaling and circulating policing strategies and police personnel from Davao have been significant in the production of bordering strategies. To a great extent, the counter-insurgency warfare of Mindanao and elsewhere in the Philippines, characterized by police violence, summary executions, militarization, spatial demarcation of danger, infiltration and collaboration, has travelled to Manila. We might even talk about an urbanization of policing strategies, which has resulted in something akin to urban warfare. This includes violence as a means by which to border in and border out, where drug personalities are outsiders and the spaces they occupy dangerous. This marks both moral and spatialized boundaries within the drug war, which has created a climate of fear that has reconfigured and transformed urban sociality – not least through a shift from proximity to distance between residents as structures of (compelled and compelling) intimacy have been challenged by an illegible terrain of violence permeating everyday life and perceptions of (in)security among the policed and the police alike. It is these dynamics of policing and processes of bordering that may turn out to be the lasting impacts of the Philippine war on drugs in areas such as Bagong Silang.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Anna Bræmer Warburg has a master’s degree in Human Security from the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is affiliated with the Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY) and her research focuses on policing, security and urban violence.

Steffen Jensen holds a professorship at Department of Culture and Global Studies at Aalborg University in Copenhagen as well as being Senior Researcher at DIGNITY: Danish Institute Against Torture. He has published extensively on urban violence, policing, criminal and violent networks in South Africa and the Philippines.

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