Downsizing Polis Diraja
By Praba Ganesan, The Malaysian Insider
Occam’s Razor dictates that the time has come to shrink the Royal Malaysian Police (Polis Diraja Malaysia). Yeah, yeah, it seemingly flies in the face of the IGP’s contract extension for “excellent service” and the cry for a bigger police force to combat crime in the country. However the time has come to look at the obvious reasons why we feel less and less safe in Malaysia and cut off the benign tumour.
A police force has to be a means to an end, not an end in itself.
It cannot just exist because it wants to. It must exist because its customers need it, otherwise it becomes obsolete.
This paid organisation is here to “police for a society”, not to “police that society”.
The difference is not semantics only — an ocean divides the two realities. The former gives you a sense of ownership of entity and process, and the other, well just frightens you.
So perhaps reducing the police force might actually increase the overall sense of security Malaysians experience. The prevailing consensus is that the police rarely do enough — in the packed urban sites or the large low-density expanses. Therefore if they cannot be the solution, perhaps they are part of the problem. The less of a hindering factor increase the chances of a solution.
So to be absolutely clear the proposal on the table is to shave a third of the police personnel in the country, not dissolving it. I am opining such a measure would provide an overall benefit to the taxpayer than not.
Let us examine.
The PDRM billboards around the city, you can see them, claim that their force is more than 200 years old, which is at odds with the country only being 50-odd years old.
They are in fact reflecting the police’s first 150 years as a security service in British Malaya; providing security to the people of the territory and upholding British laws — by extension British rule.
The police force post-independence was to have been re-jigged to continue upholding the law of the new nation through a commitment to the new constitution.
That is unfortunately not straightforward, since a colonial police force is responsible to its people only after it shows allegiance to the colonial master. The ruler comes before the people.
As such, in a young nation seeking natural transformation, the police are likely to transfer their allegiance from colonial master to the new local government rather than directly to the constitution. A sort of laws need not be seen from the standpoint of principle, but they do have to be seen from the standpoint of the government.
From one reason-lacking absolutist foreign government to an equally reason-abhorring absolutist set of local rulers — a feudal Umno government.
The failure to have a change of government for two generations has inadvertently resulted in a largely undereducated police force focused on a bond between them and government, before the law, before the constitution.
The constitution is paramount exactly because it is demanding lover. It asks you constantly to look at laws and then their principles and, even more so, their spirit.
The police have abdicated their role in defining their role to just being subservience to the government. They’ve prioritised expediency and realpolitik over founding principles.
Senior policemen should rather ask themselves when they hem protestors for a good chemical shower prior to handcuffs, are they upholding the inherent principles of political enfranchisement or protecting a regime too idea-poor to allow dissent to its rule — which is quite different from the rule of law.
The lack of that acumen undermines the police force.
Second, the police force is a large and unsurprisingly unwieldy bureaucracy. It has mushroomed without actually using its scale to deliver effectively. For a force under one chain of command, everyone in that chain is quick to point out how everything is not their job.
Lost a car? House robbed? Wallet grabbed? Who do you call?
I’m kidding. First of all you don’t call the police — even if you have figured out the right division and their balai number. You go to the police station not under the illusion that a report initiates a series of actions to deal with the situation. You go there knowing the report is part of the documentation for the aftermath of a crime — insurance claims, reissue of personal documents like ICs, birth certificates, etc — nothing more.
Further, there are always jurisdictional quandaries for things like traffic offences just on the basis of districts.
And there are no shortages of departments like the tourist police, an unbelievable waste of money. By reducing the force, there would be a need to stretch resources rather than creating redundancies, which has so far resulted in widespread bystander apathy in the force — if everyone is responsible for it, then no one takes charge of the matter since they expect the other appendages to act.
But the third point is the straightforward one. Fewer employees with the same budget would mean higher paid policemen. With competitive pay, corruption will drop in the force and the incentive to perform the job increases. More so the police will become a “choice employer”, giving it access to the brain-pool.
The complexities of modern crime — cyber crime, white collar, transnational, emerging crimes (intellectual property, identity theft, etc), human rights abuses — require IQ/EQ than just brawn.
Your cops have to be quick to technology and adept to a globalised world. SPM dropouts with the right height, weight and vision primarily as the fulcrum of the force is just well shortsighted.
Next the rise of private security. There has not been a snatch theft in my neighbourhood since the resident association hired a contractor. They have no guns, yet they have done more than what the police force has done in that aspect for 20 years in our little hamlet.
If taxpayers are paying for better security, then making them pay for an expansive police force for failing to give that elusive security seems like extortion.
