On Monday, the Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Director General Ronald dela Rosa said that priests and local officials will now join police officials in revisiting more than one million drug offenders who have surrendered under Project Tokhang.
He said that only territorial police commanders or town police chiefs, station and precinct commanders will conduct the new "tokhang" operations and they will be required to ask the local church or parish priests and barangay officials to join the visits.
"Istrikto na ang policy sa tokhang. Bahala na kung mabagal ang takbo ng tokhang, basta sigurado,"Dela Rosa said.
Last month Duterte ordered the PNP to rejoin his campaign against drugs.
During the same press conference, Dela Rosa announced the creation of the PNP-Drug Enforcement Group that will replace the disbanded AIDG.
"Ikaw drug personality kinatok ang bahay mo, nasa harap ng bahay mo chief of police, kapitan ng barangay at pari, siguro mas lalambot ang puso mo," the PNP chief added.
Dela Rosa said the subjects of the relaunched Project Tokhang are the more than one million drug offenders who surrendered from July 2016 to January of this year.
Latest data from the PNP showed that a total of 1,173,212 people, including 79,251 pushers and 1,093,961 users, surrendered under Project Tokhang from July 1, 2016 to Jan. 24, 2017. A total of 6,808,581 houses were visited under the anti-drug project.
During the same period, a total of 2,512 drug suspects were killed and 51,882 were arrested in a total of 42,798 police operations.
PNP spokesman Senior Superintendent Dionardo Carlos said during the press conference that 90 percent of the tokhang surrenderers during the almost seven-month period are considered mild to moderate users, based on a study by the Dangerous Drugs Board.