Rodrigo Duterte won the 2016 Philippine presidential election on May 9 promising to kill tens of thousands of criminals, and urging people to kill drug addicts.[20] As Mayor of Davao City, Duterte was criticized by groups like Human Rights Watch for the extrajudicial killings of hundreds of street children, petty criminals and drug users carried out by the Davao Death Squad, a vigilante group with which he was allegedly involved.[21][22][23] Duterte has alternately confirmed and denied his involvement in the alleged Davao Death Squad killings.[24] Duterte has benefited from a public perception that he made Davao into one of the world's safest cities, and he cites this as justification for his policies.[25][26][27] In reality however, police data from 2010-2015 shows that Davao has the highest murder rate and the second highest rape rate in the Philippines.[28][29]
Philippine anti-narcotic officials have admitted that Duterte uses flawed and exaggerated data to support his claim that the Philippines is becoming a "narco-state".[30] The Philippines has a low prevalence rate of drug users compared to the global average, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).[31] Duterte said in his state of the nation address that data from the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency shows that there were 3 million drug addicts 2 to 3 years ago, which he said may have increased to 3.7 million. However, according to the Philippine Dangerous Drugs Board, the government drug policy-making body, 1.8 million Filipinos used illegal drugs (mostly marijuana) in 2015, the latest official survey published; a third of them had used illegal drugs only once in the past 13 months.[32][30]
