Navigating Police Sources in Investigative Reporting

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The chapter follows the narrator's encounters with the police, particularly Colonel Domingo, while covering stories on the drug war in the Philippines. It explores the challenges of building police sources, conducting trauma reporting, and uncovering dark aspects of policing, including a secret prison run by a police source. The narrator discusses the ethical dilemmas and personal conflicts faced in investigative journalism and the process of writing a book on the drug war, detailing the selection and structuring of stories for publication.

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist whose coverage of the drug war in the Philippines has appeared in Rappler, Esquire, and elsewhere. Her recent book is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country.

“It is hard to describe the beat I do without saying very often it involves people who have died. And it seemed like an unfair way to frame it. It didn't quite seem right. … Sometimes there's no dead body, or sometimes there's 6,000, but the function is the same: that the people you speak to have gone through enormous painful trauma, and then there's a way to cover it that minimizes that trauma. So … I don't cover the dead. I cover trauma.”

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