Mayors matter: local political determinants of police use of deadly force in the Philippines under Duterte

• In Event: POL Panel 23. The impact and experiences of use of force and the promise of control mechanisms

Abstract

Thousands of suspects killed in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs illustrate the role a determined national chief executive can play concerning police use of deadly force.
This paper analyzes whether and how local chief executives (mayors) were willing to and could make a difference in local law enforcement practice in the face of strong top-down pressure on the local police to submit to national directives.
It argues that variations in mayors’ personality traits were crucial in explaining variations in their reaction to the war on drugs. A combination of certain loadings of personality traits (belief in the ability to control events, need for power, self-confidence, and task-related focus) was highly conducive to mayors’ actively using their leverage over the local police for violence control. Other loadings resulted in local chief executives’ distancing from local security governance, leaving it to the local police. The latter group of “disengagers” was less able to positively impact local police use of deadly force than the group of “engagers.”
Put simply, police violence tended to be reduced when mayors claimed to “own” local security governance and a strong voice in local law enforcement. Their actual capacity to positively impact police use of deadly force rested less on their formal powers over the police, but on the linking social capital they had established in the course of their intensive engagement with the local police leadership.

Author

• Peter Michael Kreuzer, Peace Research Institute Frankfurt