Thread: police brutality in the Philippines didn’t start under Rodrigo Duterte and they aren’t isolated cases: the Philippine National Police has long been a rotten institution since policing was built as an apparatus of repression—to serve and protect colonialism and capitalism.
This is clear in our history and in the history of modern policing in general: the gendarmerie Philippine Constabulary, the Philippine National Police’s predecessor, was formed in 1901 for colonial subjugation: to crush anti-colonial guerrillas and anti-imperialist labor unions.
Tactics now considered hallmarks of modern policing—surveillance, profiling, infiltration, “riot” control, patrolling—developed in the Philippine Constabulary’s colonial pacification drive were brought to the United States to develop their own police forces against labor strikes.
After World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency supported the Philippine Constabulary in its anti-communist counterinsurgency campaign against the Hukbalahap and used it as a laboratory to develop counterinsurgency tactics. This anti-communist campaign continues to this day.
The Philippine Constabulary was instrumental for human rights abuses under the fascist dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos—whose martial law declaration was supported by the United States to suppress dissent and growing social unrest, and to crush a renewed communist insurgency.
In 1991, the Philippine Constabulary and the Integrated National Police merged to form the Philippine National Police as a “civilianization” effort—but the same militarized tactics are still being used, and the United States still funds and trains the Philippine National Police.
Police brutality is built on a history of repression and violence to maintain racial and class inequalities and colonial control—no reforms can change a rotten mercenary institution. Abolish the Philippine National Police; and the first step is to oust the fascist Duterte regime.

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More from @pmjamilla

16 Aug
#RememberKian brings me back to covering his funeral three years ago as I stood before his tombstone and found out that we share the same birthday; what was more tragic for me was finding out from his friends mere moments after he was buried that he wanted to become a policeman.
I remember Kian Loyd Delos Santos' father, Saldy, as I was writing my thesis on the depiction of state violence in FPJ's Ang Probinsyano. I remember his father in tears, telling before a Senate hearing how his son wanted to be a policeman because of the teleserye. #RememberKian
Had Kian Loyd Delos Santos been alive, he would've turned 20 last May, he could've been in college now. That Kian Loyd wanted to be a policeman and that he was brutally killed by policemen three years ago is perhaps one of the saddest tragedies of his unjust death. #RememberKian
Read 7 tweets
22 Apr
Warning: this is a graphic on-ground footage of the fatal shooting incident in Pasong Putik yesterday, currently circulating on Facebook.

After the police shot the victim twice, a nearby resident can be heard screaming: “Bakit niyo binaril, sir? Dapat kinapkapan niyo muna!”
An alleged copy of the police report of the incident states that the police recovered a loaded revolver from the victim’s sling bag. Witnesses cited by CNN’s report, however, claim that the victim had no firearms. The victim’s sister also reiterated this in a GMA News interview.
Last April 17, United Nations special rapporteurs reminded governments that “[b]reaking a curfew, or any restriction on freedom of movement, cannot justify resorting to excessive use of force by the police; under no circumstances should it lead to the use of lethal force.”
Read 7 tweets
27 Mar
“This is not martial law,” the president says.

This is true, in the legal sense: the president did not declare one in the first place—and it can only be declared if there is rebellion (there is an ongoing one for the past 51 years), an invasion, or if required by public safety.
But then, the president treats the pandemic like an invasion, like a rebellion, like an insurgency—in short, war. It seems to be this regime’s favorite word, such that the state of national emergency becomes translated as a “state of war against an unseen enemy.”
“We are in a state of war”—so retired generals who led the government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaigns need to be at the helm of the fight against this “unseen enemy.” Military rule is now virtually imposed on an already militarized civilian bureaucracy because we are at war.
Read 9 tweets

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