Boxing day thoughts
Art Harun
Crime rate is down. Really?
I was at a Christmas dinner and I met an acquaintance. His face was badly swollen and his lips were cut. His cheeks and chin were littered with fresh wounds which were just stitched up. I was shocked to see his face.
As the story goes, two nights before Christmas, he was at a traffic light somewhere in Bukit Bintang at about 2 am. Suddenly, his windscreen was smashed by a motorcyclist.
He made the biggest mistake of his life. He came out from his car. The next thing he knew was that a group of boys on motorbikes surrounded him. They just bashed him up in the middle of the road without warning.
They attacked him like a pack of wolves attacking a lost sheep. They were relentless. The guy thought he was going to be killed. Finally, when he was almost lifeless in a pool of blood on the road, they stopped. Someone pulled his wallet and all of them rode off.
That was it. They just wanted his wallet.
This was not the only story I heard that night. The father of a young man told me how his son was being chased by about 40 rempits on the Federal Highway and on the road to Subang one night at bout 10pm! The threw a brick at his car windshield. But he was lucky. He managed to escape.
Some months ago, my neighbour’s young teenaged son was involved in a verbal skirmish with a 19 year old college student. Within half an hour, about 19 youths on motorbikes arrived at my neighbour’s front gate ready to go to war with the whole family. As a father to two young kids, I was horrified. Luckily nothing untoward happened.
These stories are indeed frightening.
Idris Jala and his band of statistic junkies should really rethink what they are doing. Rates are nothing but numbers. Numbers are what they are, namely, numbers.
If previously, there were 48 petty thefts and 2 murders and now there are 8 murders and only 2 thefts, the numbers do indeed look good. From that numbers, crimes have been reduced by 80%. And so, the country is 80% safer, right? What utter tosh!
Numbers do not and can never reflect intensity. From the extreme example above, although crimes have been reduced by 80%, the intensity of the crimes is not reflected in the numbers. And the numbers for sure do not tell and are in fact incapable of telling how safe our streets are. Or how safe we feel.
If our police could go out an arrest some people wearing red shirt gathering peacefully at the compound of our National Mosque, my obvious question is, why can’t our police come out with water cannon, tear gas, batons and what-haves-you against these pack of wolves roaming on our streets at night?
It is not as if this is a new phenomenon. It’s been around for years and years. And yet this problem, far from being solved, has gotten worse.
I would love to hear from Minister Idris and his Pemandu-pemandu, is there some sort of a KPI criterions imposed on the authorities to solve this problem? If so, can I know what they are? If not, why?
Polis merempit
By now I am sure everybody and his dog (for Muslims, please substitute cat for dog, nanti IKIM marah), has read about the guy who had lodged a police report alleging that he was beaten up and robbed by about 11 police men after he was stopped for apparently driving with an expired road tax.
In a seemingly related article, Malaysian Insider reports that two policemen have been arrested. The two were “believed to have caused hurt to a man arrested for allegedly carrying drug during a road block last Saturday.” I presume these two policemen were involved in the above incident.
There is however a twist. Where the assaulted man mentioned that he was stopped for road tax offence, the Malaysian Insider reports that the man was arrested for allegedly carrying drug.
Wow. Someone must really be telling a bloody lie!
Whatever it is, the point is this. If the report about the man being assaulted and robbed is true, then our police force really has some deep soul searching to do. And the same applies with our Home Ministry.
In a civilised society and in a country aiming to be a high income country by the year 2020, the act of the police being involved in beating up, torturing and even causing the death of any arrested person is totally and categorically unacceptable. It is despicable, in fact.
The police has been in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons too many times and too frequently. The number of death caused by the police shoot-to-kill actions is alarmingly high. 279 persons have been shot dead by the police between 2000-2009. Everybody would remember the late Aminurasyid, a 14 year old boy who was shot to death, for example.
By contrast, New Zealand only has 22 police shooting death in 70 years! The UK, with almost double our population, only has 48 police shooting death in 22 years between 1985-2007.
What gives?
Malaysia has abstained from voting on the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel and Unusual Treatment 1984 although this protocol was adopted by 127 countries, including Indonesia, Cambodia and East Timor, on 18.12.2002. 42 countries, including Malaysia had abstained and 4 voted against it.
One wonders, had Malaysia adopted the protocol, wouldn’t A Kugan be still alive now? And wouldn’t Teoh Beng Hock be happily married and seen walking around carrying a healthy toddler now?
It is with these kind of happenings that civil societies of Malaysia have been calling for the government to immediately implement to proposal of the Royal Commission for the establishment of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC).
It is ironic that while the Prime Minister had pledged to protect the civil liberties of the people, some police men are doing their darndest best to achieve the exact opposite.
