A change of government will work wonders for public services

Pak Bui

Near the end of a walk over the long weekend, I found a wallet lying on the road. It contained RM38 and a Mykad of a 17 year old student. I could not find any contact number, and the address printed on the Mykad was in a distant town.

I kept the wallet and went off to the nearest ‘Pondok Polis’ or police beat-box. It was closed. A cheerful Indian security guard, in a white uniform with blue epaulettes, was sitting in a tiny room next to the ‘Pondok Polis’. Out of curiosity, I knocked on his door. He was not the privatised version of the police, he assured me with a smile, he was simply guarding the mosque next door.

The security guard told me the ‘Pondok Polis’ had been empty for months. I was relieved to see the windows of the beat-box had remained intact. There was no graffiti on the walls, nor used needles on the floor. The security guard had policed the police beat-box well.

I drove over to another ‘Pondok Polis’, several minutes away. It truly resembed a ‘Pondok’: it was little more than a hut. It consisted entirely of a dingy container-sized room lined with thin, peeling plywood. An antique air-conditioner clattered away in one corner. Five bored young policemen sat around a long table covered with scarred formica.

I gave them the lost wallet and my Mykad. I made small talk with them, while resting my forearm on the table top. Almost immediately, small wheals began to appear on the skin that had been in contact on the table, a dramatic allergic reaction. I stifled my alarm regarding the nature of the dirt that had caused the allergy, and sat scratching myself pensively.

An old television, apparently produced to coincide with the first appearance of colour broadcasts in our country, showed pictures of rich food being ecstatically devoured by a female food ‘presenter’, dancing in the slight haze of a static snowstorm on the screen.

One policeman entered the details of the lost wallet in a giant register, resembling the attendance book in my primary school. Another police officer sat staring in a stupor at the TV, reciting the names of dishes as they appeared on screen: “udang masak lemak”…“kerabu mangga”…“tauhu sumbat”.

When I stood up and left, they smiled and thanked me courteously. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the cash would simply vanish from both the wallet and the large register. Would they feel sorry for the careless schoolboy?

My doubts are a pungent whiff of our Malaysian zeitgeist. We do not trust our policemen. Most policemen have been manipulated by Umno, and brainwashed by Umno to serve only Umno. The policemen’s blind obedience to their master’s voice has overshadowed their vocation of public service.

Even in Sarawak, where our police have always been more professional and more multi-ethnic than in the more race-obsessed peninsula, policemen are often treated with contempt, fear, or a mixture of both.

The behaviour of police officers in the Bersih 2.0 rally last July 9 was disgraceful. Some riot police obeyed orders to fire tear gas into a crowded tunnel, while others punched and kicked peaceful demonstrators. Police have caused the deaths in custody of Amirulrasyid Amzah, A Kugan and untold numbers of other victims.

Policemen have behaved shamefully, like thugs, supporting threats from logging and plantation tycoons to rural communities defending their native customary land throughout Sarawak. In the towns and cities, police officers, notorious for corruption, have extorted money from ordinary people and undocumented migrants. Most of us will have driven past an intimidating ring of policemen, harrassing a poor immigrant by the side of the road.

When state-spomsored violence is let loose on citizens, most policemen and soldiers do what they are told, and some even enjoy the brutality. All occupying armies and police forces, without adequate political supervision, have been brutal throughout recorded history.

Some police and army personnel, however, will still defy orders to inflict pain on others. More and more Syrian security forces, for instance, have been doing this in recent weeks, by defecting to the side of the people’s uprising against the dull-eyed tyrant Bashir al Assad.

In Sarawak and Malaysia, I have met some good Malaysian policemen too. I have watched some policemen express sympathy for unjustly arrested human rights demonstrators. I have met courageous Malaysian policemen after their tour of duty as United Nations peacekeepers in Angola and other war-torn nations.

Our police force can be reformed: most Sarawakians and Malaysians are fundamentally peace-loving, law-abiding people. The reforms of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC) would be a good start.

How can we accomplish this? Of course, we would be hard pressed to imagine that any government, Barisan or otherwise, would not abuse the police and would resist the temptation to use it to impose its will on the people. We can only impose meaningful restraint on the police, by imposing the people’s will on the government.

Simply put, the government will only muzzle the police when we hold them under threat of losing power, and by strengthening a two-party system, checks and balances, and crucial institutions like the judiciary and the press.

We can only imagine the boost this would give to our public services – not just the police, but also the armed forces, the government health care system, local councils, and our schoolteachers.

These public services will improve if, and only if, we work towards a change of government, and we voters impose threats of further changes of government.

When I left the ‘Pondok Polis’ after surrendering the lost wallet, it struck me that the young police officers’ morale must be as low as the dirty linoleum on the floor, given the scandals that have engulfed our police force in recent years.

Yet these young men still have an essential role to play. If, for example, a few minutes after tending to the mundane lost-and-found case of the missing wallet, there had been an armed robbery in the bank a few blocks of shops away, those young policemen would have had to risk their lives to protect ordinary people.

The police need our support, as well as our criticism. One essential plank of this support is that we must vote in the coming general election, and persuade all our friends and families to vote. If we overturn the decades of political corruption that have degraded and humiliated the ruling parties and the police, it would do wonders for the police, and the rest of our public services.