“When a President Says ‘I’ll Kill You’” is a Times documentary on the deadly crusade led by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines that he has called “a war on drugs.” The film features Raffy Lerma, a photojournalist for The Philippine Daily Inquirer who has tirelessly worked to tell the story of the the killings. Andrew Glazer, a senior video producer for The Times, recounts some of his experiences making the documentary.

The commander accidentally wrote on a slide screen with a marker as he mapped out a route for the day’s operation in a crowded Metro Manila neighborhood. The screen was sacrificed for nothing: the swarm of heavily armed SWAT officers on motorcycles got lost en route to the staging area, earning a very public dressing down after reassembling a half-hour later.

This is President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” in action. Fierce. Massive. And more than a bit haphazard. Police officers, rifles in hand, rounded up dozens of young men trying to keep cool in the doorways of their modest homes, herding them onto a basketball court. The local police call this a One Time, Big Time — a large show of force in a Philippine community said to be plagued by drugs. The young men aren’t suspects, but they’re clearly terrified.

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With reason. Since taking office on June 30, President Duterte has made it open season on drug dealers and users, calling for the police and vigilantes to kill suspects. I was in Manila in early December to film a short documentary on that violent campaign. By then, the official death toll had reached nearly 3,000, though independent observers and journalists said that may only be half the actual toll.

As the armed officers ask the corralled men to “voluntarily” register their names, Chief Inspector Ed Palaylay boasts of the success of Mr. Duterte’s heavy hand. In just six months, the police had cut crime by half in Pasig City, a sprawling area of Metro Manila.

I mention to the inspector that he has left a seemingly important number out of his calculus: Since July, more than 90 bodies have been found on Pasig City streets, all homicide victims. There have been no arrests, charges or trials. Isn’t this an embarrassment for him and his comrades?

No. Inspector Palaylay explains that all of the victims were involved in drugs — but he deflects any request for proof, since none of the deaths were actually investigated.

Did they deserve their fate? “No comment.”

Interview over.

The disconnect between the successes touted by the commander and the mounting death toll stuck with me. But none of the local news photographers I met that night were surprised when I recounted this. Nearly every night since President Duterte took office, they have decamped at police headquarters, sipping stale coffee and smoking, waiting for a call. They often arrive at the crime scene before the police or the local funeral homes — with the body or bodies lying alone on the street, often mummified in duct tape. The police often unconvincingly report that the deceased had pulled guns on them during a buy-and-bust operation.

“The president promised this,” said Raffy Lerma, one of the deans of the Night Beat corps of local reporters. “He promised that people will die.”

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The president and his bloody campaign remain wildly popular, and that bothers the Night Beat. This tight-knit tribe believes that their audience needs to be bothered, too. So they have put normal life on pause to document death, sometimes more than five times in a single night. Many follow up the next morning to photograph wakes and funerals and to meet with surviving family members. These interviews and images don’t often make the paper, but the photojournalist Raffy Lerma tells me that being there is a bracing dose of the victims’ humanity — something he said the president and the police have tried to scrub from the story.

Consider one photograph Mr. Lerma took in early July, which showed the world that the president meant to follow through on his campaign promise. It depicted a woman cradling her partner’s body — so evocative of Mary cradling Jesus’ dead body that it’s known as “La Pieta.” In his State of the Nation address, President Duterte singled out Mr. Lerma’s photo, claiming it had been staged with actors. But this image, and others like it taken by the Night Beat team, are what called me and other journalists to cover this urgent story.

There’s a convention in journalism that it’s generally bad form for reporters to report on other reporters. Doing so can be self-referential. But every good story has conflict. And the more I looked into what’s going on in the Philippines, the more I saw dedicated journalists like Mr. Lerma and his friends on the Night Beat as some of the boldest voices challenging the president’s bloody rhetoric.

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