The innocent in an unthinking war
Today, the Catholic calendar marks the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the slaughter of the male children of Bethlehem on the orders of Herod. It is hard not to think, on this day, of Kian delos Santos—the 17-year-old boy killed during the four-day “one-time-big-time” (OTBT) antidrug police operation in August 2017.
Like the biblical innocents who were massacred for fear that one of them could be the “King of the Jews,” Kian was killed not for what he had done but for what he was made to represent in an operation that needed dead bodies to prove itself.
After eight years of judicial proceedings that began at the Caloocan Regional Trial Court, moved to the Court of Appeals, and ended at the Supreme Court, the case against the three policemen who killed Kian is finally closed. In a ruling released this month, the Supreme Court affirmed with finality the guilty verdict earlier handed down by the lower courts. PO3 Arnel Oares, PO1 Jeremias Pereda, and PO1 Jerwin Cruz were convicted of murder.
Most Filipinos can no longer recall their names. They blend into a larger facelessness consisting of the countless police officers who participated in the drug war’s killings, many of them acting under pressure to deliver results, to meet quotas, to show “performance” to their superiors.
Seen in their police uniform, they appear ordinary. That ordinariness is part of what makes the crime harder to understand. Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” was meant to name precisely this: atrocious acts carried out as routine; violence committed without the interruption of the inner voice that asks what one is doing and why.
These officers could have had children of school age themselves. Yet they paid no heed as Kian begged them to let him go: “[s]ir tama na po, pauwiin niyo na po ako kasi po may exam pa po ako bukas.” The boy lived in the neighborhood. He was about to close the little sari-sari store that his parents owned when the policemen arrived and took him with them. They did not see him smoking pot or pushing drugs. A police asset, under pressure to identify suspects, had pointed at him.
Several witnesses—among them three young women who were Kian’s neighbors—testified to what they saw. CCTV footage showed the three policemen dragging the boy toward a dark alley; that footage was produced in court. A forensic examination of Kian’s body showed that he was shot several times in the head from a distance of about 2 feet. The trajectory of the bullets indicated that he was in a defenseless kneeling or sitting position when shot.
Eighty other “drug suspects” were killed in more or less the same way during those four days of OTBT or Oplan Galugad. But only Kian’s case prospered. The community came together—neighbors, the Church, the media, volunteer lawyers—to pursue justice for him and, by extension, for the many others whose deaths were quickly filed away as “nanlaban.”
Who knows how many lives were spared in subsequent operations because public outrage briefly broke through the fear and resignation? Kian’s name became a kind of boundary marker: a reminder that if we do not push back against impunity, thoughtless killing by state forces can become ordinary practice, especially when the poor are the ones being dealt with. It is in that sense—not by intention, but by consequence—that I consider him a martyr.
Still, a few weeks after Kian’s death, then President Rodrigo Duterte pressed on with his orders: “If [drug suspects] pull out a gun, kill them. If they don’t, kill them still, son of a whore, so it’s over, lest you lose the gun. I’ll take care of you.” The statement was more than a boast. It was a reassurance to the police, especially after Kian’s killing had sparked institutional unease, that no one would be held to account.
The high court ruling named the crime and punished the perpetrators. What it did not do was to interpret the broader setting that incubated the killing: a political climate in which lethal violence was repeatedly authorized from above, rewarded below, and treated as routine police work. We do not demand philosophical essays from Supreme Court decisions. But we expect our magistrates to recognize, in plain language, when a killing is not merely an individual lapse but a symptom of a larger pattern of thoughtlessness built into State policy and practice.
I’m afraid this particular decision will long be remembered not for what it said but for what it did not say.
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