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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