“What crime against humanity?” Mr. Duterte said in defense of his antidrug campaign. “I’d like to be frank with you, are they humans?”

At the height of the government’s crackdown in 2016 and 2017, Market Three, named after the nearest pier, was an epicenter of the killings, even though the majority of the 1,000 or so families living here had nothing to do with the drug trade.

There were bodies found floating in the water, while other people were killed in their homes, as many as five in a night.

While residents blamed the police for many of these summary executions, in most cases, the killers were never identified.

But the police left no doubt it was they who smashed open doors during frequent raids in the middle of the night, wearing masks, carrying guns and shining flashlights into the faces of Market Three’s residents.

Because people couldn’t quite discern why the police or their proxies were killing some and not others — mistaken identity or disproportionate punishment were frequent guesses — the raids filled the whole slum with a fear that death could happen at any time, for any reason.

There’s less of that now. While the government’s deadly antidrug campaign goes on, the police focus has shifted to other areas of the country and to other targets. Just on Wednesday, Mr. Duterte ordered the police and the military to shoot people protesting the nation’s lockdown over the coronavirus.