IGP, please clean up the force

COMMENT I remember when I was a five-year-old toddler, I used to salute the traffic police whenever we passed by one of them.

They would almost certainly wave back. Perhaps, it was because my late father was once upon a time with the police force when he was much younger and the officers knew him personally. I still recall seeing his photograph in white uniform, and he used to tell us that he had his big bike. Therefore, I know he was a traffic policeman in Seremban, with the rank of an inspector on entry into the force.

Two of my late uncles were also with the police. One was involved in fighting the communists, the other was a police clerk, but his son subsequently joined the police training before ending up serving the Singapore police force. He is now a veteran, serving his fellow retirees.

Those were the days when, as children, we looked up to the police with great admiration and respect. These days, instead of a smile or waving back to my son (when he was much younger), whenever he waved to them, I could only see a frown or a blank face.

A few years ago, I tried to teach my son to distribute Mandarin oranges to some policemen who were on ‘Ops Payung’. To my horror, when I stopped my car and allowed my son to get down to hand over a bag on Mandarin oranges, he was greeted with a frown on the constable’s face.

I still remember the growl on the old policeman’s face, as if he was ‘Mr Goon’ in Enid Blyton’s ‘The Mystery Series’. There was not even a word of “Thank you” for the kind gesture shown by my son; thereafter, we stopped giving away Mandarin oranges to even the nearest police station.

After all, there was no favour to be gained by distributing the Mandarin oranges except to teach my children to show their appreciation to the boys in blue.

In fact, occasionally, the local police had asked my help to invite the press for their events and my advice to them had always been to publicise all the arrests made especially of snatch thieves to counter the already bad publicity that the Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM) has been getting.

Cleaning up the force

The last time I wrote about police corruption, I was called in to give a statement. The officer concerned was polite, and I did whatever I could to provide the information that he required in order to address the issue involving some members of the force.

I was hoping that the inspector-general of police (IGP) would do all that is within his power to clean up the bad apples within the force, but sadly, this is a task that has become nearly impossible.

In the past few weeks, I have come across a number of occasions where a foreigner is stopped by several cops. It makes me wonder why there are sometimes up to four or five policemen on motorbikes surrounding two foreigners just to check their passports, but we hardly see them patrolling our neighbourhood.

Or a group of traffic policemen would set up roadblocks at least three or four times a week at their favourite spot, but in the early part of the morning when the traffic jam is bad, we are always told that there are not enough policemen to man the junctions.

Just yesterday, I captured some photographs (see enclosed) of another such incident where two constables made a quick U-turn to stop a foreigner. The photographs were sent via WhatsApp to the police chief in the local police station. He encouraged me to lodge a police report, which I should be doing very soon.

Although it has never been my intention to put grains of sand into the rice bowl of another person, I think sometimes, as concerned citizens of this country, we have to do something to stop the ‘evil’ that is plaguing our nation.

A neighbour of mine whose house is currently under renovation told me that one of the Indonesian workers was asked to enter the police patrol car because he did not have a permit. She told me that she saw the police slapping the Indonesian worker.

When the boss of the renovation firm finally settled the matter, the Indonesian worker was released. Such stories are not uncommon. When I was holidaying in Langkawi with my family last year, I came across a foreigner who was working with an Indian restaurant.

He told me that he used to work in Kuala Lumpur. In the federal capital, he was constantly being harassed by the police, despite him having a valid work visa. If the IGP is serious about getting down to the root of the problem, there are also other horror stories where people with valid passports and work visa were also harassed, after their passports had been confiscated.

In Langkawi, the foreign worker told me that it was safer for him to go out on the streets. The police there were more upright. “If you commit a traffic offence,” he said, “you just go to the nearest police station and pay your summons.”

Another Nepali security guard in Petaling Jaya that I spoke to told me that it was always unsafe for him and his fellow citizens in the Klang Valley. They face the risks of being stopped by the police, asking for some money.

What foreigners think of the PDRM

The IGP must send his men to gather intelligence about how his boys are treating the foreign workers, if he wants to know the truth. They should pose as ordinary citizens, asking for feedback from foreign workers. It is no point asking me to produce all the evidence to support what I say. The truth is out there, and it is common knowledge to most Malaysians.

A simple question that the IGP has to ask is: Why are there so many illegals in this country? Besides the weaknesses at the immigration checkpoints and the ongoing trafficking of humans into this country, why are there still so many illegals in our midst?

As Malaysians, we have to sometimes look into their needs on humanitarian grounds, risking ourselves for harbouring them. For example, when one of them is sick and in pain, and needs to go to the hospital, what do I do? Do I just leave him by the roadside the moment I realised he could not produce his valid visa or passport, or do I still send him up to the hospital?

The important thing is how foreigners think of our police force, which is supposed to uphold the Royal emblem. To answer that question, I bring us back to an incident in Mozambique where I was living for one whole year when my wife was on a contract job there.

I was making a U-turn to get to the other side of the road. I noticed this short Mozambican policeman, carrying an AK47 rifle, hurriedly walk across the road to hail down my car. Speaking in Portuguese, he demanded to see my driving license and my passport.

Being advised never to surrender the passport to any policeman, I merely showed the page of my passport with the valid visa. I then asked him to issue me a traffic summon so that I could settle it later.

He was not satisfied, and demanded to have my passport, to which I told him to lead me to the nearest police station. Instead of a police station, he took me to an office equivalent to our City Hall enforcement office.

Because I could not differentiate between the city enforcement officers and the police by their uniforms, I surrendered my passport to be inspected. I had to wait several hours, before I decided to call my Malaysian friend and his Mozambican girlfriend.

When they told me that it was the City Hall enforcement office, I was angry. They had no right to hold my passport for the few hours. We decided to see the commander of the unit to make a big fuss over it, but before we could even meet him, the passport was already handed to his office.

Furious, I told him off that, instead of treating foreigners with respect, his men were giving me a very bad impression of Mozambique. I was writing to promote tourism in Mozambique for a Malaysian English daily, and the Mozambican Minister of Tourism knew me personally because of my contributions to his nation and I occasionally met him for a drink at the Holiday Inn, where we were staying.

There are countless of other experiences that my wife’s colleagues and I had with the customs officers at Maputo airport. Bags belonging to people travelling to Maputo often went missing, and their personal items being removed. I was also hauled into a room, where a lady officer asked me if I brought coffee for her. My reply to her was: “Madam, I am not allowed even to bring 100ml of water into the plane. I would love to bring you a cup of coffee from Malaysia.”

My impression, and yours of Mozambique as I relate the stories, would be exactly how foreigners returning to their countries would tell their fellow countrymen. As Malaysians, are we not ashamed with the kind of bad hats we have in our police force, immigration and customs checkpoints?

Why, despite being independent for sixty years and striding towards 2020, are we are still allegedly one of the most corrupted nations in the world? Can we continue to live in denial?

I hope not. Therefore, I ask if the IGP can pick this up and do something drastic to cleanse the Royal Malaysian Police. It is better to hand over the bad apples to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Agency (MACC) instead of them setting up a dragnet to net more than a thousand bad hats.

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STEPHEN NG is an ordinary citizen with an avid interest in following political developments in the country since 2008. -Mkini