WS More or Less: Drug deaths in the Philippines
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the last two months the Government in the Philippines has been encouraging the police to clampdown on the illegal drug trade. The new President, Rodrigo Duterte, went as far as saying that citizens could shoot and kill drug dealers who resisted arrest, and the killings of drug suspects were lawful if the police acted in self-defence. The press have been reporting numbers of how many people have been killed during the crackdown – but how much trust can we put in these figures?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello and welcome to More or Less, your statistical guide to the numbers and the news, |
| 0:10.0 | and anywhere else we choose. |
| 0:12.0 | Later in the programme, we'll be looking at how gambling and maths have influenced each other. |
| 0:17.0 | But first, we look at the murky world of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines and ask, |
| 0:22.0 | how reliable are the numbers being reported. |
| 0:36.2 | On June 30th, a new president took office in the Philippines. Rodrigo Duterte was nicknamed the Punisher for his strong stance on crime. |
| 0:40.9 | He made the international news this week after he |
| 0:43.5 | reportedly called President Obama a son of a whore. But we're looking at |
| 0:48.1 | media reports on the huge numbers of deaths connected to the Filipino |
| 0:52.3 | president's crackdown on the |
| 0:54.0 | illegal drug trade. In the last month the reported numbers have been leaping |
| 0:58.1 | up. About 900 suspected drug traffickers have been killed since Mr. Duterte |
| 1:02.4 | was elected in May. |
| 1:04.0 | Nearly 2,000 people killed since the crackdown began seven weeks ago. |
| 1:09.0 | Two and a half thousand people have been killed in just over two months since Mr. Duterte came to power. |
| 1:15.7 | The most recent estimate we've seen is that 2,972 people have been killed. Over the last few weeks our reported Jordan Dunbar has been hearing these numbers increasing |
| 1:27.0 | and started to wonder, |
| 1:28.0 | where do these figures come from? How reliable are they? |
| 1:32.0 | During President Duterte's election campaign, he promised to unleash the police to battle criminals. |
| 1:37.0 | Mr Duterte promised to kill 100,000 in his first six months in office |
| 1:42.0 | and dumped so many bodies in Manila Bay that the fish will grow fat. |
... |
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