Seventeen years ago when a rash of shootouts between police and suspects criminals issued in several deaths to the latter, a doyen of the legal profession, Raja Aziz Addruse, pressed the alarm button.
Raja Aziz, who died in 2011, had already a served a term as Bar Council president and was at that time president of the National Human Rights Society (Hakam), aired his worry on the spate of deaths from shootouts, publicly speculating that the force appeared to be "trigger-happy".
Those alarums promptly elicited a robust response from the then-inspector-general of police Abdul Rahim Noor who chided the lawyer for being naïve about the dangers to their safety posed by hardened criminals in possession of firearms.
The nature of Rahim's response contained an implicit rebuke to the mentality of the armchair liberal who is apt to underestimate the threat to civil society emanating from hardcore criminals when the latter are allowed the liberty of the range.
One remembers that Raja Aziz (left) did not go on to argue the finer points of law enforcement and crime prevention with his interlocutor.
Raja Aziz must have felt that the subtleties of the argument he was trying to make would have been lost on the IGP: he was saying that the cops, when apprehending suspects, must prefer to err on the side of caution because the rule of law requires that proof of guilt must be tendered before a life is placed in summary danger.
In a sense, it may have done Rahim some good had Raja Aziz attempted to give him a refresher course in human rights because the IGP would go on, two years later, to give a 'black eye' to the sacked deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in an altercation at the ISA detention quarters in Bukit Aman in late September of 1998.
As a consequence of the flare-up, Rahim would lose his job but it is to be doubted that the lessons of that incident and the finer points of Rahim's exchange with the late Raja Aziz would have had much purchase on the minds of the people who lead the police force these days.
These lessons, when apprehending criminals, can be summarised in one succinct line: "Above all, not too much zeal."
Three guns, five dead bodies
Word that at least one of the five suspected criminals who were killed in a shootout with police in Penang last Monday had bullet holes in his body - one in his temple, one on the eyebrow and another in the chest - cast doubt on the police claim that the suspects fired at the police and were killed in the ensuing shootout.
Additionally, there were only three guns found on the suspects which meant that at least two of them were unarmed. This would suggest that they could not have fired at the police and have thus invited counter fire. The deaths of the unarmed duo must be ascribed to collateral damage.
In legal parlance, there is a term - 'the balance of probabilities' - which refers to the range of likelihoods that counsel reasonably appraising a situation has to weigh when attempting to arrive at a conclusion.
With the number of custodial deaths (more than 220) that have occurred in the last 13 years put against, in the comparable period, the number of deaths from police shootouts with suspected criminals (the number is unavailable but is reckoned to be several score), the balance of probabilities - considering one that involved a pregnant woman's death in Puchong in the late 1990s - is that a number of innocent people would have met with untoward fate in the series of shootouts with police that have occurred since 1996, the year when these shootings began occurring with troubling frequency.
This makes the ardent defence of police conducttendered yesterday by the present IGP, Khalid Abu Bakar (left), in respect of the shootings deaths of five suspects in Penang earlier this week, reminiscent of Rahim Noor's extenuations in reply to Raja Aziz's strictures in 1996.
In his comments on the shooting deaths, Khalid appears to have felt no constraint stemming from the rebuke that retired justice VT Singham aimed at him in the latter's written judgment handed down earlier this year in the A Kugan custodial death case.
Singham found Khalid remiss in his role as Selangor chief police officer when the death of Kugan occurred in a police lock-up in Subang in 2010.
It appears there's only a difference in trajectory between hardened cops and hardened suspects: one set can get to be upwardly mobile while it's mostly curtains for the other.
Those alarums promptly elicited a robust response from the then-inspector-general of police Abdul Rahim Noor who chided the lawyer for being naïve about the dangers to their safety posed by hardened criminals in possession of firearms.
The nature of Rahim's response contained an implicit rebuke to the mentality of the armchair liberal who is apt to underestimate the threat to civil society emanating from hardcore criminals when the latter are allowed the liberty of the range.
One remembers that Raja Aziz (left) did not go on to argue the finer points of law enforcement and crime prevention with his interlocutor.Raja Aziz must have felt that the subtleties of the argument he was trying to make would have been lost on the IGP: he was saying that the cops, when apprehending suspects, must prefer to err on the side of caution because the rule of law requires that proof of guilt must be tendered before a life is placed in summary danger.
In a sense, it may have done Rahim some good had Raja Aziz attempted to give him a refresher course in human rights because the IGP would go on, two years later, to give a 'black eye' to the sacked deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in an altercation at the ISA detention quarters in Bukit Aman in late September of 1998.
As a consequence of the flare-up, Rahim would lose his job but it is to be doubted that the lessons of that incident and the finer points of Rahim's exchange with the late Raja Aziz would have had much purchase on the minds of the people who lead the police force these days.
These lessons, when apprehending criminals, can be summarised in one succinct line: "Above all, not too much zeal."
Three guns, five dead bodies
Word that at least one of the five suspected criminals who were killed in a shootout with police in Penang last Monday had bullet holes in his body - one in his temple, one on the eyebrow and another in the chest - cast doubt on the police claim that the suspects fired at the police and were killed in the ensuing shootout.
Additionally, there were only three guns found on the suspects which meant that at least two of them were unarmed. This would suggest that they could not have fired at the police and have thus invited counter fire. The deaths of the unarmed duo must be ascribed to collateral damage.
In legal parlance, there is a term - 'the balance of probabilities' - which refers to the range of likelihoods that counsel reasonably appraising a situation has to weigh when attempting to arrive at a conclusion.
With the number of custodial deaths (more than 220) that have occurred in the last 13 years put against, in the comparable period, the number of deaths from police shootouts with suspected criminals (the number is unavailable but is reckoned to be several score), the balance of probabilities - considering one that involved a pregnant woman's death in Puchong in the late 1990s - is that a number of innocent people would have met with untoward fate in the series of shootouts with police that have occurred since 1996, the year when these shootings began occurring with troubling frequency.
This makes the ardent defence of police conducttendered yesterday by the present IGP, Khalid Abu Bakar (left), in respect of the shootings deaths of five suspects in Penang earlier this week, reminiscent of Rahim Noor's extenuations in reply to Raja Aziz's strictures in 1996.In his comments on the shooting deaths, Khalid appears to have felt no constraint stemming from the rebuke that retired justice VT Singham aimed at him in the latter's written judgment handed down earlier this year in the A Kugan custodial death case.
Singham found Khalid remiss in his role as Selangor chief police officer when the death of Kugan occurred in a police lock-up in Subang in 2010.
It appears there's only a difference in trajectory between hardened cops and hardened suspects: one set can get to be upwardly mobile while it's mostly curtains for the other.
TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.
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