BY ROGER M. BALANZA
As the crime index the past days zoomed up to taint the city’s image as a dangerous ground for criminals, Vice Mayor Rodrigo Duterte called police to a command conference and dished out a morbid order: Make the city very dangerous for criminals.
The order hints of bloody murders: Davao City, while famous as Mindanao’s premier city, is home to the dreaded Davao Death Squad (DDS), blamed by human rights activists as behind more than a thousand summary executions during the past decade.
The DDS, said to be police-backed, was at the core of a 2009 probe into the summary killings by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), that also invited, then sitting mayor Duterte, for his alleged tolerance of the executions.
Duterte’s order to police came amid a steep rise in robberies and holdups, break-ins and thefts and homicides.
The rise in crime incidents came as a taunting challenge to Ronald dela Rosa who was named new city police director. Mayor Sara Duterte has welcomed dela Rosa with high hopes rising crimes could be curbed. Dela Rosa returns to the city that he served for nearly two decades after stints as provincial police commander in nearby Davao del Sur and Compostela Valley.
The CHR probe led by then Commissioner Leila de Lima (now the Justice Secretary) that tried to link Duterte to the DDS had led to nowhere, with the rights body failing to issue results of the investigation.
The suspension stemming from administrative charges slapped by the interior department on several police precinct commanders where the extrajudicial killings occurred had been thrashed on appeal by the Court of Appeals.
Duterte had disowned role in the DDS, sharp-shooting shadowy motorcycle-riding gunman armed with 45s. He said the executions were perpetrated by criminal gangs over soured deals with members. But he also said the killings could be public retaliation against criminals who escape imprisonment through legal maneuvers.
While some charges had been filed in court against the some of the gunmen, there has been no conviction.
The local bureau of the CHR which conducted probes on the killings said witnesses and relatives of victims, after reporting the killing and pointing a finger at suspects, refuse to testify against the gunmen for fear of reprisal.
