MANILA—Sometimes it takes the whole night, other times the dead bodies turn up early. What’s certain is that the Manila Police’s graveyard shift is now worthy of its sinister name.
After the May 9 presidential election I took to spending my nights at the capital’s larger police precincts—on top of my day job at AFP’s Manila bureau.
Rodrigo Duterte had been elected president by promising to kill thousands of criminals. I wanted to be on the streets if or when he carried out his threat.
A few days after the election, police began rounding up drunks, unaccompanied children, and shirtless men—enforcing new district-level curfews. We’d not seen this before.
It would be a few weeks before the bodies started to pile up.
I use radio to keep informed of what’s happening in the city. The set is always on—even when I’m asleep.
It’s helpful on the crime beat to develop police contacts, but as a rule I avoid making friends with officers. A lot of police enjoy media coverage too much—they keep framed clippings of crimes they have solved on their desks. One officer kept texting me to ask me to photograph a thief he’d arrested.
It was the night of June 25 when the radio alerted the first killing that was walking distance from my apartment. Police had raided a slum in a Muslim area in northern Manila and killed three drug suspects.
To get there, I had to squeeze myself and 18 kilograms of camera kit and a laptop through a hole in a concrete wall that led to a long, dark, muddy alley.
“What if I get mugged here?” I thought. I was armed only with a flashlight. I had two camera bodies and three lenses—two of them expensive primes with large apertures for shooting in low light.
But I made it to the house without incident and found a gaggle of TV crews and other photographers.
The most memorable case was the July 22 shooting of a rickshaw driver on a busy intersection. The victim’s girlfriend broke through the police tape and clutched her dead boyfriend as she cried out for help. The photograph of that scene—which looked like Michelangelo’s Pieta sculpture—went viral.
There were a lot of photographers there, shooting their third death of the night. The woman shouted “stop shooting and help us instead.”
We were shell-shocked. Some of us simply stopped shooting. Many of us began to question our motives. Why are we doing this? We’re like vultures. We couldn’t eat that night. We couldn’t talk on the ride back. Everyone felt guilty that we hadn’t been able to help. Later, one local newspaper photographer who had been there that night quit covering the graveyard shift.
Death comes in three versions in this drugs war.
First, there is the so-called police “buy-bust” sting operation, where suspected dealers almost always end up with a bullet below the eye, their limp hands touching a handgun.
Second, there are the Philippine streets’ angels of death—the “riding-in-tandem” motorcycle gunmen. Their faces are always camouflaged with their helmets and scarves, according to witnesses and CCTV images of hits. One of the pair drives the getaway bike. The gunman walks up to the target, fires and then hops onto the bike for a casual getaway.
The motorcycle gunmen were responsible for the death of the rickshaw driver in the Pieta-like image. They always leave behind their signature, a rectangular piece of cardboard saying in Tagalog: “I’m a pusher, you’re next” or “I’m a pusher, don’t be like me.” Sometimes they even draw a Batman logo.
Third, there are mystery killers. All we see are their victims—left on lonely, poorly-lit streets or in vacant lots, the corpses riddled with gunshot or stab wounds. The faces—sometime the entire corpse—are wrapped in packaging tape, like some sort of Egyptian mummy. The bodies all have the same cardboard signs accusing them of dealing in narcotics.
Some nights there are as many as 18 bodies reported. It’s physically impossible to photograph them all.
To show the full picture of the Duterte anti-crime campaign, AFP’s Manila bureau decided to try and meet people who were detained in the crackdown. I proposed visiting the jail in Manila’s Quezon district, which was built for 800 inmates but now houses nearly 4,000 prisoners.
What we saw shocked us. The inmates were packed like sardines in the courtyard. Inside the overflowing cells there was hardly any space for us to walk between the makeshift beds and hammocks. I had to ask some sleeping inmates to get up so we could get past them.
Covering that overcrowded jail was the closest I’ve ever been to hell. It reminded me of old paintings of Dante’s Inferno. If hell were real, that’s what it would look like.
