In the Philippines, the graveyard shift is the real thing

Coffin of Noel Salamat, watched by his wife Khrisna. (Colin Freeman for The National)

MANILA // No one, not even his own family, ever thought that Noel Salamat was an angel. When he failed to return one night to his home in the Malabon slum district, his wife’s first hunch was that he was out womanising, or perhaps on a drug binge smoking shabu, the Filipino answer to crystal meth.

Two weeks later, a relative found his bullet-ridden body at a local undertaker. A brief police report given to the family said that his corpse had been found in roadside shrubbery, his assailants unknown.

That the report did not dwell on who carried out the attack is no great surprise. Since the election last year of president Rodrigo “Dirty Harry” Duterte — a man who makes Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy cop look gentle — some 7,000 Filipinos have died in suspected “EJKs”, or extrajudicial killings, according to a report released in March by Human Rights Watch.

Most are believed to be the work of police death squads or vigilantes, whom Mr Duterte himself has urged to take the war on drugs into their own hands.

“We’ve no idea what happened,” said Noel’s wife, Khrisna, 36, her pink T-shirt stretched over a stomach pregnant with the couple’s fifth child. “He’d stopped using drugs, but still took them occasionally. He wasn’t the kind to get into trouble, though — he was very friendly and trusting.”

Yet while Noel’s killers seem unlikely to ever be found — much less prosecuted — his family at least has the scant consolation that his death will not go unnoticed by the wider world. As Khrisna sat grieving at his all-night wake, a small group of photojournalists arrived to take pictures of his white open casket, and to ask what little detail she knew about his demise.

Welcome to life — and death — on the “graveyard shift”, the apt nickname for what is probably one of the busiest police beats in modern crime reporting.

Operating from a shabby office in the central police precinct, the 9pm to 4am shift used to be just another part of the daily grind for Manila’s press corps, for whom drug violence in the hours after dark is nothing new.

But since July, when Mr Duterte came to power on a pledge to declare all-out war on dealers and their customers, the level of carnage has soared. Sometimes there have been up to 27 murders a night. In the cramped backstreets of neighbourhoods like Malabon, the traditional all-night wakes held to mourn a loved one’s passing seem never-ending.

Whether every single death is an EJK rather than just routine bloodshed is impossible to tell. But while their sheer frequency no longer means they barely count as “news” any more, the “graveyard shift” has now attracted a dedicated hardcore who cover it regularly.

“The more you cover it, the harder it gets to walk away from it,” said photographer Eloisa Lopez, 21.

Rather like the Oscar-nominated movie Nightcrawler, in which Jake Gyllenhaal's cameraman chases ambulances and police cars around Los Angeles, those on the "graveyard shift" spent much of their time following police sirens. But while Gyllenhaal does it purely to make a quick buck, his Filipino counterparts hope to show the wider world the human cost of Mr Duterte's policy.

As the outcry against it has grown — critics in the Philippines want him prosecuted by the International Criminal Court — the police have done their best to keep the media at a distance, cordoning off murder scenes before they arrive.

But there are always other sources of information, such as undertakers like Orly Fernandez, whose parlour was where Noel’s body turned up. Mr Duterte infamously joked that his war on drugs would be a boom time for undertakers, and sure enough, Mr Fernandez has had few quiet nights in the past year. “The records speak for themselves,” he says, flicking through ledgers packed with entries listing “gunshot wound” as the cause of death.

Yet the photographers’ diligent coverage of the slaughter does not seem to have put Filipinos off their president, whose approval ratings have dropped only slightly from 83 per cent to around 76 per cent. While human rights groups query government claims that the drug war has dramatically slashed crime rates, many Filipinos back the idea of putting the fear of God — or at least death squads — into the criminal fraternity. And that includes Mr Fernandez, even though he sees the daily slaughter more close-up than those on the graveyard shift do.

“There are far fewer people getting raped and robbed, because now it is the criminals who are scared,” he said. “”When I meet the families of the dead, I feel sympathy of course. But personally, yes, in a way I support this drug war.”

Ironically, so too do many of the families of the victims — especially those in slums like Malabon, where the effects of drug-related crime are often felt the most. They just wish it was done differently.

“We are not against fighting drugs, we are just against these killings,” said Khrisna’s friend Marites Oliveros, sitting next to her at the wake. As a kitten from a nearby alley prowled around under Noel’s coffin, she told of how her own brother was killed in the crossfire of a drug feud five years ago.

“They are killing these people like cats,” she said.