Thirty-two dead in a day is a good thing, said the president. Kill more, and maybe the scourge will end.
When 17-year-old Kian Delos Santos died in boxers and a t-shirt, killed by cops with CCTV rolling, the administration scrambled for explanations. Witnesses stepped forward and said he did not fight back. A police chief was sacked. Senators mourned. Promises were made. The deaths of minors and innocents became a national issue.
Suppose Kian was anything like 18-year-old dropout Joshua Cumilang, who sometimes sniffed solvent and was shot in front of his screaming mother. Suppose, like Rex Aparri, he was a 30-year-old former drug runner whose blood his father had to wash out of their living room floor. Suppose, for example, that he was like Danilo Dacillo, 36, whose own aunt turned him over to cops for jailing because of his dealing, and was killed instead. Each of these men died in police operations for allegedly fighting back. Each case had witnesses claiming the deaths were murder.
The cops now say Kian’s father was an addict. They claim the teenager was a drug runner. If his death does not fullfill the low bar of absolute innocence now placed before the thousands killed in the last year, it is possible his death and reported murder by police officers will no longer be considered a “happily isolated” incident by the Palace. It can, like so many others, be relegated to four paragraphs in a police spot report noting a neutralized drug personality who fought back. Lower the bar any further, and it’ll take the picture of a dead pigtailed five-year-old clutching a gun for the government to weep over the death of another citizen of the republic.
Kian was not the first. Calling his death isolated allows for the death of the next, who might not be as innocent, but who will be just as dead.
Source: FB post by  Patricia Evangelista