Another police procedural

Another police procedural

Film Review: On the President’s Orders by James Jones and Olivier Sarbil

By Joe Rivera

Nothing surprises us anymore about President Rodrigo Duterte, whether it is the inflammatory language he normally spouts off his mouth or the routine threats of extermination he promises will come upon ardent critics of his policy on the war against drugs.

Not even the newest documentary about Duterte’s beastly policy on the war on drugs, On the President’s Orders by James Jones and Olivier Sarbil, could further illuminate Duterte’s frame of mind. The said documentary which was shown to a large audience in Toronto last April 27 during the Canadian International Documentary Festival unfortunately appears more of a police procedural, not so unlike the popular TV episodes of Blue Bloods or Chicago PD which both glorify and sometimes glamourize the police as efficient enforcers of the law.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Duterte was already espousing the killing of criminals as a solution t0 the growing problem of criminality in the Philippines. That it has raised concerns and fears was clearly underestimating what a president-elect Duterte might actually do if allowed to implement his much-vaunted political platform of waging a war against drug addicts, users and pushers alike.

While Duterte was mayor of Davao City, human rights groups demanded an investigation of his complicity in the killings of hundreds of people in Davao since the 1980s which many have described as government-sanctioned death squads. The Davao police denied such death squads existed although investigations by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and the Philippines’ own Commission of Human Rights have found evidence that they did exist and that police officers and other government officials had been involved.

‘Kill them all and end the problem’

During the presidential campaign, Duterte also made a barrage of boasts that he had personally killed armed criminals, “not 700, but 1,700.” If elected president, he promised to deploy the police and the military in an all-out assault on criminal gangs.

“It is going to be bloody,” Duterte said. “I will use the military and the police to go out and arrest them, hunt for them. And if they will offer a violent resistance, and thereby placing the lives of the law enforcers and the military whom I would task for a job to do, I will simply say, ‘Kill them all and end the problem.’”

The handwriting was clearly on the wall early on during that presidential campaign, that the evidence of Duterte’s murderous proclivity while he was city mayor could be a symbolic victory for the notion that extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals was a legitimate approach to crime control.

Tame depiction of war on drugs

The current documentary, On the President’s Orders, only confirms Duterte’s true intent in implementing his policy of the war against drugs: the extermination of the poor who are usually the victims of drug addiction. Filmed inside the squalor and the squatters of Caloocan City, it was more than obvious that the war on drugs was meant by Duterte to be a war against the poor. Yet it the was the poor who were well-behaved and respectful of the law during the entire filming, while those responsible for enforcing the law paraded themselves in full gear, armed and dangerous, as they struck fear in the hearts and minds of the people. But this documentary was not the most horrific and the most violent yet in the history of Duterte’s war on drugs. On the contrary, it was tame, nearly sanitized. In the end, the police were depicted as an efficient machine, doing only what their superiors ordered them, which is a bad and terribly flawed excuse.

A much better documentary with text and chilling photographs, was an article prepared by Daniel Berehulak for the New York Times in December 7, 2016. Entitled “They Were Slaughtering Us Like Animals,” Mr. Berehulak, a photojournalist, documented 57 homicides over 35 days during the height of Duterte’s brutal antidrug campaign.

Mr. Berehulak wrote:“I have worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa’s Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death. What I experienced in the Philippines felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers’ summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes’ taking seriously Mr. Duterte’s call to “slaughter them all.”

After watching On the President’s Orders, the feeling one gets afterwards is all emptiness. Nothing sickening or revolting since the documentarists followed the cops in sorties and raids orchestrated by the police. It was all about the cops, the police as a well-oiled fear-mongering machine, which if pushed to shove would not hesitate to kill. Watching the scenes where the local SWAT marched in the squatter areas to confirm or purge their hit list of drug users, or the prison warden performing his rituals of punishment to his captives leads one to question if this was all the so-called violent acts authorized by Duterte.

No attempt to delve into root causes

Moreover, there is zero attempt by the filmmakers to delve into the deeply-rooted causes of drug addiction, and in the end, they failed to elucidate why the war on drugs, not just in the Philippines but world-wide, is already considered a total failure.

Leaders all over the world, including those from the United States, the European Union, and other countries ravaged by the drug menace such as Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia, have started rethinking the global war on drugs. Many have unanimously conceded that the war on drugs is not working, and that there is no justice in this approach to the drug addiction problem. As the Colombian president said: “A war that has been fought for more than 40 years has not been won. When you do something for 40 years and it doesn’t work, you need to change it.”

Thenew-found consensus focused on investing in health care, addiction treatment and alternatives to incarceration which would do more to end the drug trade than relying primarily on prohibition and criminalization. Several countries outside this consensus, including Russia and China, maintain that criminalization should remain the cornerstone of the fight against drugs.

One-sided view

If only the filmmakers of On the President’s Orders grounded themselves with a deeper understanding of the causes and ways to control drug dependency, they would have certainly produced a more enlightening documentary instead of a very one-sided and favourable police procedural. For one, they should have spoken to civic and religious leaders, rights groups and other organizations in the Philippines which see drug dependency as a public health issue, rather than a strictly criminal justice challenge.

One way to reverse the brutality of Duterte’s war on drugs, perhaps, is gradually returning anti-drug programs to the civil authorities. After so many thousands of killings with impunity and government corruption, the Philippines needs a comprehensive drug policy that understands drug addiction beyond criminalization and law enforcement. This could be subject for the next documentary film on the drug menace in the Philippines.