FVR tells cops: Disable, don’t kill, drug suspects

Ramos at the Inquirer —GRIG MONTEGRANDE

Concerned about the rising number of drug-related killings in police operations, former President Fidel V. Ramos reminded police that the rules of engagement required them “to shoot to disable and not shoot to kill.”

At the Meet Inquirer Multimedia forum on Tuesday, the 88-year-old Ramos said more drug addicts and pushers were getting killed than drug lords being eliminated or sequestered.

The death toll in President Duterte’s campaign against what he called a “pandemic” has reached 5,000—half of the figure in police operations and the rest blamed largely on vigilantes.

“The rule of engagement of police against suspects is shoot to disable and not shoot to kill,” stressed Ramos, who served as the chief of the Philippine Constabulary during the martial law years.

“Unless the person that you are chasing or about to arrest is pointing a gun at you, you aim for his knees. If he is running away, you aim for his buttocks,” he said.

He also reminded the police that there was a “better reason” to keep their targets alive even though wounded in the hospital than dead in a funeral parlor.

“They can provide evidence [and answers as to] who is the mastermind, what is the network, who are your customers, how do you bring in your contraband,” Ramos said.

Asked what worried him the most in the current administration’s bloody war on drugs, he replied: “I have the same fear as everyone else—that drug addicts and buyers are getting killed. But it’s the drug lords that must be eliminated and sequestered.”

He also said that death was a “too easy kind of punishment” for criminals compared to life imprisonment, when they will be tortured by conscience, by their lack of access to their loved ones and by their uselessness while locked up in jail.

“That to me, personally, is a more tormenting kind of torture,” Ramos said.

But in the same breath, he said the Duterte administration must drop its “tunnel vision” in its antidrug campaign, noting that there were other problems plaguing the country, that if addressed might help in the reduction of the illegal drug problem and other crimes.

“The reduction of illegal drugs and the elimination of crime will come as part of the reforms if we have better means of livelihood, better education, transportation, housing, food and cheaper gasoline, etcetera,” he said.

“Although it is a good thing, our fight against drugs, it is not everything,” he said./rga