Controversial leader – who has endorsed extrajudicial executions of drug offenders – says he killed to show police officers ‘if I can do it, why can’t you?’
The Joy of Trump
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte personally killed criminals
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte says he personally killed criminals
Controversial leader – who has endorsed extrajudicial executions of drug offenders – says he killed to show police officers ‘if I can do it, why can’t you?’
Rodrigo Duterte has announced he personally killed suspected criminals when he was mayor of his home city of Davao in the Philippines, cruising the streets on a motorcycle and “looking for trouble”.
The country’s president made the comments in a speech late on Monday night as he discussed his campaign to eradicate illegal drugs, which has seen police and unknown assailants kill around 5,000 people since he became president on 30 June.
“In Davao I used to do it personally. Just to show to the guys [police officers] that if I can do it, why can’t you,” he was quoted as saying by AFP, talking of his two decades as mayor of the southern city of 1.5 million people.
“And I’d go around in Davao with a motorcycle, with a big bike around, and I would just patrol the streets, looking for trouble also.
“I was really looking for a confrontation so I could kill.”
The former mayor was nicknamed “Duterte Harry”, after the fictional and ruthless police inspector played by Clint Eastwood, for his support for vigilante death squads that killed hundreds of suspected criminals.
Duterte previously has both denied and acknowledged his involvement in the Davao death squads.
Since taking his bloody anti-crime campaign to the nation level, he has been criticised by the United States and United Nations, whose concerns have drawn only angry rebukes.
“If they say that I am to stop because of the human rights and guys … including Obama, sorry, I am not about to do that,” Duterte said in English during his speech at the presidential palace this week.
Duterte has a better relationship with US president-elect Donald Trump, who he said had praised his war on drugs during a phone call this month. This was not confirmed by Trump’s team.
As president Duterte has publicly encouraged civilians to kill drug addicts and said he will not prosecute police for extrajudicial executions. But he has also said he and his security forces will not break the law.
In October Duterte compared himself to Adolf Hitler and said he would be “happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts.
Since his election, police have reported killing 2,086 people in anti-drug operations. More than 3,000 others have been killed in unexplained circumstances, according to official figures.
Often masked assailants break into homes and kill people who have been tagged as drug traffickers or drug users. Human rights groups have warned of a breakdown in the rule of law with police and hired assassins operating with impunity.
A report by the Guardian in October cited a senior officer in the police force who claimed he led one of 10 special operations teams, each with 16 members, tasked with killing suspected drug users, dealers and criminals.
The officer claimed the hit squads are composed of active police officers and that the murders are conducted in such a way as to make them appear to be perpetrated by “vigilantes” to deliberately obscure police involvement and preclude investigation.
The report was later denied by the chief of police. Duterte has insisted police are killing only in self-defence while gangsters are murdering the other victims.
But he has also said he will not allow any police officers to go to jail if they are found guilty of murder in prosecuting his war on crime.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
https://www.theguardian.com/
One Stolen Gun's Path of Destruction in Chicago
A Glock used in five shootings that killed two people sits at the Homan Square police facility June 9, 2016, in Chicago.
(Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)
One gun's journey — 42 bullets fired, 2 killed, 5 wounded
Gun Stolen from legal owner...
The story of the Glock's journey from safe to shoebox comes at a tumultuous time for Chicago as homicides spike to levels unseen in the city for two decades. Chicago police say the proliferation of guns plays a key role in the seemingly endless cycle of violence, particularly in impoverished pockets of the South and West sides.
As police battle the glut of firearms, the Glock illustrates the devastation — both human and financial — that a single gun can leave behind.
The Glock was what police call a gang gun, passed among its members as needed. Its devastation — unusual for one firearm in a year's time — was spread over a significant stretch of the South Side.
Guns get to Chicago in many ways.
In so-called straw purchases, those with a firearm owner's identification card can carve out a niche business buying guns in Illinois for felons barred from owning weapons because of their criminal records. Another option lies a few miles away over the border in Indiana, where gun shows require no background checks.
A study in 2015 by the University of Chicago Crime Lab found 60 percent of the newer guns recovered from gang members had come from out of state — half of those from Indiana. In separate interviews done at Cook County Jail, gun offenders said gangs sometimes tapped members to make buying trips.
"All they need is one person who got a gun card in the 'hood and everybody got (a gun)," the study quoted one inmate as saying.
For now, the Glock's journey has ended at the Homan Square police facility on the city's West Side. Sealed in a Manila envelope, it is stored on a metal shelf in the department's mammoth gun vault, a secure, fenced-in area that includes tens of thousands of guns taken off the street by police over the years.
Read More @ Source:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-chicago-violence-gang-gun-met-20161007-story.html
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